Close
Course overview
Competition law faces unprecedented challenges from technological disruption, economic crises, and evolving societal demands. The convergence of crises such as COVID-19, climate change, inflation, digitalization, and AI has created complex regulatory challenges across the EU, UK, and globally. Traditional competition frameworks struggle to address emerging issues like digital market dynamics, innovation incentives, and economic inequality.
These challenges demand both theoretical evolution and practical innovation in competition law enforcement, particularly in developing new analytical frameworks for digital markets, integrating computational methods into competition analysis, and balancing traditional objectives with broader societal goals like sustainability, technological innovation and inclusive growth.
This course combines critical analysis of recent competition law and digital regulation developments with practical training in computational methods for analyzing complex economic relationships. It provides essential insights for competition authority officials navigating new regulatory challenges, private practitioners advising on evolving compliance requirements, and corporate executives implementing competition and digital regulation strategies in the EU and UK. The curriculum emphasizes both theoretical understanding and practical application, preparing participants to address current and emerging challenges in competition law and digital regulation.
Key areas of the course include:
- The impact of new technologies on competition law and the evolving legal frameworks.
- A polycentric and complexity science-driven approach to competition law enforcement, encouraging critical engagement with multiple perspectives.
- Insights into the roles of mergers, unilateral conduct, and cooperative practices.
- Real-world case studies from leading jurisdictions including the EU, the US, and BRICS nations.
- Computational competition law and economics, showcasing the role of computational analysis and AI in shaping the future of competition law enforcement.
This course is designed to not just inform but also to challenge conventional thinking, fostering a deeper understanding of how competition law adapts to the rapid changes in a technology-driven and complex economy.
Learning outcomes
Upon successful completion of this module, participants will:
- Develop the ability to critically analyse principles and methodologies of competition law enforcement.
- Gain advanced knowledge of various policy approaches to competition cases, engaging with a broad range of perspectives.
- Understand the dynamic application of competition law to technological advancements, particularly in digital ecosystems.
- Master the fundamentals of computational competition law and economics, including the use of technology (AI) to enhance enforcement accuracy.
- Acquire a critical understanding of the modern digital economy and how it is regulated.
Who is this course for?
This programme will appeal to:
- Policy-makers and officials from competition authorities.
- Lawyers, economic consultants, and data scientists involved in competition law enforcement in either the public or private sectors.
Benefits for you
- Expert Insight: Engage directly with leading academic minds and practitioners in the field of competition law, offering real-world perspectives on landmark cases and policy shifts.
- Practical Application: Equip yourself with tools and methodologies that can be applied to both day-to-day decision-making and strategic initiatives.
- Network Growth: Collaborate and connect with a global cohort of professionals, creating valuable long-term partnerships within the industry.
- Critical Thinking: Foster a more nuanced understanding of the socio-economic factors influencing competition law, ensuring you stay ahead in a rapidly evolving regulatory environment.
Benefits for your organisation
- Enhanced Compliance: Ensure your organisation remains compliant with the latest competition law developments, reducing the risk of fines or litigation.
- Strategic Advantage: Gain insights that help your business navigate competition challenges, from mergers and acquisitions to collaborative practices.
- Innovation & Sustainability: Equip your team with the knowledge to engage with competition law issues that focus on innovation, sustainability, and emerging markets.
- Data-Driven Decision Making: Leverage the latest advancements in computational competition law to make informed decisions that drive growth while adhering to legal frameworks.
- By attending this course, your organisation will not only strengthen its internal legal and policy expertise but will also be better positioned to compete and thrive in a complex global economy.
Content
- Key Topics
Day One
- State of play of competition law enforcement: the key issues of the past year
- The Reform of Article 102 TFEU: The Commission’s Guidelines and beyond
- Case studies on abuse of dominant position (exclusionary conduct cases)
- Case studies on abuse of dominant position (exploitative conduct cases)
Course leaders: Prof. Ioannis Lianos, Hon. Prof. Gonenc Gurkaynak, Ass. Prof. Deni Mantzari, Dr. Stavros Makris, Dr. Beatriz Kira
Day Two
- The economics of competition in digital ecosystems and AI
- Case studies on digital mergers
- EU and UK Digital regulation (DMA, DSA, Data Act, the European Health Data Space, DMCC): interactions with competition law
- Competition Law and AI
Course leaders: Prof. Patrick Rey, Prof. Ioannis Lianos, Hon. Prof. Cristina Caffarra, Dr. John Davies, Dr. Cecilia Rikap
Day Three
- Sustainability concerns in competition law enforcement
- Competition law and the Bioeconomy
- Healthcare and Pharmaceutical antitrust: new developments and critical perspectives
Course leaders: Prof. Ioannis Lianos, Dr. Damien Gerard, Ass. Prof. Déni Mantzari
Day Four
- Introduction to computational competition law and economics
- Introduction to Agent-based modeling and advanced network analysis for competition law assessment
- Use of Large Language Models (LLMs) in competition law enforcement: a state of play
- Financial analysis in competition law assessment
- EU Evidence Law, Standard of proof and data science
Course leaders: Prof. Ioannis Lianos, Dr. Omar Guerrero, Dr. Helena Malinkova, Dr. Apostolos Filippas
- Course structure and assessments
Delegates will receive four hours of lectures/ seminars each day. There will therefore be a total of 16 hours of classroom teaching over the four days. There will be no assessment but delegates will receive a certificate of completion provided that they attend at least 12 hours (75%) of classes.
- Teaching Staff
Professor Ioannis Lianos
Ioannis is Chair of Global Competition Law and Public Policy at UCL and a member of the UK Competition Appeal Tribunal since 2024. He was President of the Hellenic Competition Commission (2019-2024) and chaired the Special Law Commission, leading to Greece’s 2022 competition law reform. Elected to the OECD Competition Committee Bureau (2021-2023), he also advises governments on competition and IP law. Lianos is the founding director of UCL’s Centre for Law, Economics and Society, edits major legal publications, and has held visiting professorships at top universities, including Sciences Po and NYU.Honorary Professor Dr Cristina Caffarra
Cristina is Co-founder and Vice Chair of the Competition Research Policy Network at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) in London. She also serves as an Honorary Professor at UCL Laws. A leading figure in competition economics, Cristina is known for her extensive work on antitrust matters and economic policy, advising on high-profile cases across Europe and globally. Her expertise spans competition, regulation, and digital markets, making her a key voice in shaping competition policy and enforcement worldwide.Associate Professor Dr Despoina Mantzari
Despoina (Deni) is Associate Professor of Competition Law and Policy at UCL, co-directing the Centre for Law, Economics and Society. She holds a PhD and LL.M. from UCL and a law degree from the National University of Athens. Previously a lecturer at the University of Reading, her research spans competition law, behavioral economics, and regulatory discretion. She is an editor for key legal journals, general editor of LexisNexis’ Competition Law of the European Union, and author of a monograph on courts and economic evidence published by Oxford University Press.Honorary Professor of Practice Dr Gonenc Gurkaynak
Gönenç is the founding partner of ELIG Gürkaynak Attorneys-at-Law, a prominent law firm in Istanbul, Turkey, comprising 95 lawyers. He graduated from Ankara University Faculty of Law in 1997 and was called to the Istanbul Bar in 1998. Gönenç earned his LL.M. from Harvard Law School and a PhD from UCL. With over 25 years of international legal experience, he previously worked with a global law firm in Istanbul, New York, and Brussels. Gönenç is a sought-after speaker on competition law and has published four books and over 80 articles in esteemed international law journals.Dr Stavros Makris
Stavros is a Lecturer in Competition Law at UCL, joining in September 2024. He previously taught EU Competition Law and US Antitrust at Glasgow University, LSE, Wageningen University, and Sciences Po Paris. Stavros holds a law degree and a Master in Philosophy of Law from the University of Athens, and an LLM from UCL. He completed his PhD at the European University Institute (EUI). Stavros has advised the Hellenic Competition Commission and peer-reviewed for leading competition law journals.Prof. Patrick Rey
Patrick Rey is a Professor of Economics at the Toulouse School of Economics; he has been the director of the Institut d’Economie Industrielle (IDEI) and, before joining Toulouse, he headed the Laboratoire d’Economie Industrielle (LEI) at CREST (INSEE, Paris), which he founded, and (what is now) the Ecole Nationale de la Statistique et de l’Administration Economique (ENSAE, Paris).Dr Beatriz Kira
Beatriz is a Assistant Professor in Law at the University of Sussex and post-doctoral fellow at UCL Laws, specialising in digital governance and the regulation of technology companies. Her research spans platform regulation, antitrust, AI, and data protection, with a focus on content moderation systems. She co-leads a British Academy-funded project on platform regulation in Brazil and the UK and co-chairs the Law and Political Economy Network. Trained as both a lawyer and a social scientist, Beatriz earned her PhD in Economic Law and Political Economy from the University of Sao Paulo and an MSc in Social Sciences of the Internet from the University of Oxford. Her expertise has been sought after as an expert consultant for the Brazilian competition authority (CADE) and as a researcher for the Brazilian Institute of Applied Economic Research (IPEA).Dr. John Davies
John Davies is a Member of the UK Competition Appeal Tribunal. He is an economist with 30 years' experience in the economics of competition and regulation. He has worked as a consultant in the private sector, and in the public sector he has been Chief Economist at the UK Competition Commission, Chief Executive of the Competition Commission of Mauritius and Head of Competition Policy at the OECD.Dr. Apostolos Filippas
Dr. Apostolos Filippas is an Assistant professor of Information, Technology, and Operations at the Fordham Gabelli School of Business, and a research affiliate at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy. He is working on AI, market design, and the economics of technology, primarily in the context of online platforms, social media, and marketing. His recent research has examined the design of reputation, pricing, search, advertising, and matching systems in online marketplaces, the design of social media platforms, and the economic and public policy implications of the sharing economy. His work has appeared in academic and popular press venues such as Management Science, Marketing Science, the ACM conference on Economics and Computation, the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, the Washington Post, the LA Times, the Financial Times and NPR.Dr. Damien Gerard
Dr. Damien Gerard has been appointed as Prosecutor General of the Belgian Competition Authority in December 2021. He is currently a Visiting Lecturer in Competition Law at the University of Louvain (UCL, Belgium) as well as a visiting professor at the College of Europe (Bruges). He is a member of the New York Bar and fully qualified in Brussels where he practiced at a leading law firm for a number of years. He is a graduate of the University of Louvain, the College of Europe and New York University. Damien Gérard has published and spoken extensively on EU competition law enforcement, substantive antitrust law, EU State aids law and general EU law, including internal market issues and institutional matters.Dr. Omar Guerrero
Omar Guerrero is the Head of Computational Social Science Research and leads the Policy Modelling Theme at the Turing's public policy programme. He is an economist by training, and has a PhD in Computational Social Science (CSS) from George Mason University. Previously, he worked at University College London and at the University of Oxford, in the Saïd Business School and in the Institute for New Economic Thinking.Dr. Helena Malikova
Dr. Helena Malikova is a European Union civil servant with the European competition watchdog the Directorate General for Competition (DG COMP) at the European Commission in Brussels. Helena is attached to the directorate investigating foreign subsidies flowing into the European economy. She is currently leading the directorate’s work on intelligence gathering and investigations and is researching the valuation of strategic M&A facilitated by foreign governments. Helena was previously a member of the Chief Economist Team at DG COMP advocating for greater use of financial and business data in antitrust economics. Prior to that role, Helena led the investigation under European State aid rules into the tax planning practices of multinational corporations including those of Big Tech firms. During the financial crisis, Helena was part of the European Commission’s Financial Crisis Task Force where she helped assess the bailout and restructuring of numerous European banks. She subsequently worked on a number of Covid-19 related state-bailout cases including in the aviation sector and helped analyse financing needs resulting from the Covid-19 crisis. Helena practices competition policy across the broad spectrum of European antitrust enforcement. She has been called upon to lead and participate in unannounced inspections, or raids, of corporate premises in sectors from e-books to pharmaceuticals. In addition, she has published on the geopolitics of artificial intelligence and conflicts of interest among antitrust economists, academics and economic consultancies advising on regulation. Helena has previously been an EU Fellow at UC Berkeley, and she is a fellow at Centre for Digital Governance at the Hertie School, Berlin and at Harvard Kennedy School.Dr. Cecilia Rikap
Dr. Cecilia Rikap is a Head of Research and Associate Professor in Economics at the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP). Until joining UCL, she was a permanent Senior Lecturer in International Political Economy (IPE) at City, University of London and programme director of the BSc in IPE at the same university. She is a tenure researcher of the CONICET, Argentina’s national research council, and associate researcher at COSTECH lab, Université de Technologie de Compiègne. Cecilia’s research is rooted in the international political economy of science and technology and the economics of innovation. Her recent work focuses on the political economy of AI and explores new quantitative methods drawing on network analysis for understanding the rising concentration of intangible assets leading to the emergence of intellectual monopolies, among others from digital and pharma industries.- Bonus Events
We will have two workshops in the mornings of the week of training on 17 June and 19 June which students registered for the course can attend without charge.
17th June from 09:00 - 14:00
Promoting competition in technology ecosystems: economics, business and legal issues
See further details19th June from 09:00 - 14:00
Computational Competition Law and Economics
Details to follow
