Due to the pandemic restrictions, the annual conference of the Association of Competition Law Scholars (ASCOLA) had to take place as a virtual conference this year. Prof. Michal Gal (University of Haifa, Israel), Prof. Rupprecht Podszun (University of Düsseldorf, Germany), Prof. Peter Pichl (University of Zurich, Switzerland) and their teams provided an excellent organization, so that seventeen panel and six annex sessions brought together competition scholars from all around the world. Among the wide variety of topics, research on the antitrust challenges of the digital economy as well as on reform options for competition policy represented the core of the academic discussion. This was also reflected by the keynote from Margrethe Vestager (European Commission, Executive Vice President and Competition Commissioner) and the panel of star economists Steven Salop (Georgetown University), Dennis Carlton (University of Chicago), and Daniel Rubinfeld (Berkeley University of California).
The team from Ilmenau University's Chair for Economic Theory participated with three presentations in this high-profile conference:
- Victoriia Noskova presented her research on "Digital Personal Assistants as Gatekeepers for Consumption? How Information Intermediaries Shape Competition".
- Annika Stöhr showcased her project on "Price Effects of Horizontal Mergers: A Retrospective on Retrospectives".
- Oliver Budzinski discussed his paper on "The Economics of International Competition Policy: New Challenges in the Light of Digitization?".
New papers from Ilmenau's Institute of Economics can be found here.