Viktoria Robertson (Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien) brought together leading antitrust researchers and scholars for the Vienna Competition Days in September 2023. Panels on (1) Competition Law and Democracy, (2) Computational Antitrust, (3) Digital Mergers, and (4) The Digital Markets Act and Beyond saw three speakers each and two comments.
Oliver Budzinski (TU Ilmenau) was a speaker on the Computational Antitrust-panel along with Fabiana Di Porto (University of Salento) and Jürgen Fleiß (University of Graz). Comments were given by Gabriele Carovano (Italian Competition Authority) and Barbara Seelos (Bitpanda). In his presentation "On the Use of Computational Antitrust in Merger Control: Descriptive Empirical Evidence and Alternative Avenues", Oliver Budzinski presented empirical evidence on the use of computational tools by competition authorities and discussed, inter alia, the relevance of budgets in this context. Furthermore, he discussed the limits to a possible growth of such instruments in the near future and explored two alternative uses - namely, (i) employing computational tools for ex-post analyses and (ii) instrumentalizing such tools for countering systematic pro-merger incentive biases of managers and consultants in companies considering new mergers and acquisitions.
Oliver Budzinski and Victoriia Noskova from Ilmenau's Economic Theory Group contributed to the Stanford University project on Computational Antitrust with their publication on computational antitrust.