For the past few decades, competition authorities around the world have said they seek to promote consumer welfare. However, in recent years, several national competition authorities have announced major investigations into behavior by digital platforms—including some behavior that does not immediately harm downstream consumers. This has reopened old questions about the fundamental purpose of competition law: What is the harm that competition law is designed to address? How, exactly, does competition law promote economic welfare? Separately, the literature on ecosystems emphasizes the central role of non-generic complementary investments as a defining feature of ecosystems and the power this can give to ecosystem orchestrators over their associated complementors. We draw these strands together to show how a recently proposed economic foundation for competition law, drawing on the transactions cost literature, provides a consistent, compelling, and economically sound foundation for competition policy toward digital platforms going forward.

中文翻译：

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数字平台和竞争法的交易成本法

在过去的几十年里，世界各地的竞争主管机构都表示他们寻求促进消费者福利。然而，近年来，多个国家竞争主管部门已宣布对数字平台的行为进行重大调查——包括一些不会立即伤害下游消费者的行为。这重新提出了关于竞争法基本目的的老问题：竞争法旨在解决什么危害？竞争法究竟如何促进经济福利？另外，关于生态系统的文献强调了非通用互补投资作为生态系统的一个决定性特征的核心作用，以及这可以赋予生态系统协调者超过其相关互补者的权力。