Abstract:
Very general concerns have been voiced regarding the competition implications of some digital platforms’ superior access to data, with quite different businesses being grouped under a broad digital platform characterisation. A key insight from our review is that such generalisations are not appropriate. A concern that is grounded in a given feature of online search, say, cannot be simply translated to a retailing environment.
Indeed, there are good reasons why data-driven competition concerns should not be expected to hold in the retail sector specifically. A general presumption that retailers that have access to large troves of data relative to smaller competitors necessarily hold unassailable competitive positions is not justified.
A monolithic approach to assessing the competitive effects of data and, notably, asymmetric access to data, is not appropriate. This is because the relevance of particular data (and particular data asymmetries) for competition depends on the type of data involved, and the nature and extent of the benefit associated with more data, as well as the market context. A one size fits all perspective cannot be applied to determine whether data-based competition concerns are material to a specific setting.