CREATe Public Lecture - 7 February: Professor Ioannis Lianos, "Re-orienting Competition Law: A Complexity Perspective"

Time: Wednesday 7 February 2024, 5:30pm UK time

Location: Humanity Lecture Theatre, Main Campus, in-person only

Speaker: Professor Ioannis Lianos, Chair of Global Competition Law and Public Policy at the Faculty of Laws, University College London,

Chair: Dr Magali Eben, Senior Lecturer in Competition Law, CREATe, University of Glasgow

Abstract

Competition law is presently living its 'liminal moment’. Following the great soul-searching exercise imposed by the economic ‘irritant’ of the digital platform phenomenon the last decade, competition authorities had to weather the storm of the Covid-19 pandemic, while they have been recently confronted to the tidal wave of price hikes and inflationary trends. Furthermore, competition authorities around the world are beginning to deal with the sustainable development goals, not exclusively the environmental and climate change protection agenda, but also the social sustainability one, in particular with regard to the transformation and precarity of work in the digital ‘gig’ economy and the changes AI may bring to the relation between capital and labour as well as entrepreneuship. Finally, there are calls to enhance the role of industrial policy considerations in competition law enforcement, which if taken forward may jeopardize the policy autonomy of a field of law that has been at the centre of the effort of EU integration in recent decades. This simultaneous eruption of these different policy agendas the last five years, in combination with socio-economic developments that have challenged systemic resilience (a pandemic and accompanying economic crisis) may become vectors for significant changes, not only of the methodological and conceptual toolkit of competition law but also more broadly of its goals and overall role in the legal and regulatory system of the EU. The lecture will assess these developments and will put forward the various broader approaches/narratives that are currently in the making (by academia as well as competition officials around the world) in order to make sense of this new reality and to provide a (new) purpose or re-purpose the competition law enterprise. The lecture will particularly emphasise the influence of complexity science (as the new public policy science for competition law in the 21st century) in the emergence of this new competition law and policy equilibrium, and will undertake some legal foresight on the challenges to come.