Scholarship

Error Costs in Digital Markets

The Global Antitrust Institute Report on the Digital Economy

Legal decision-making and enforcement under uncertainty are always difficult and always potentially costly. The risk of error is always present given the limits of knowledge, but it is magnified by the precedential nature of judicial decisions: an erroneous outcome affects not only the parties to a particular case, but also all subsequent economic actors operating in “the shadow of the law.” The inherent uncertainty in judicial decision-making is further exacerbated in the antitrust context where liability turns on the difficult-to-discern economic effects of challenged conduct. And this difficulty is still further magnified when antitrust decisions are made in innovative, fast- moving, poorly-understood, or novel market settings—attributes that aptly describe today’s digital economy.