Platform antitrust: a quantitative analysis perspective

The analysis of 746 documents collected in the Web of Science core collection shows that the research on platform antitrust is interdisciplinary in research area and comprehensive in research topics. In terms of content, it mainly involves three aspects: First, two-sided market and network externalities are the basic characteristics of the platform economy, which also lead to market tipping and lock-in effects on consumer users. This is the fundamental reason for the antitrust problems in the platform economy. Second, the frontier areas of the platform economy have attracted more and more attention, such as autonomous vehicles, information-centric network, computing force networks and cognitive radio networks, cloud computing. These areas have posed challenges to antitrust regulation due to the usage of the most advanced technology and algorithms. Third, for the latest measures on platform economy antitrust regulation, in terms of legislation, the EU Digital Markets Act defines "gatekeepers" and imposes strict obligations on them not to disrupt the market competition order; in terms of analytical framework, numerical simulations method has become a new tool for analyzing complex monopoly behaviors.