Personalized Pricing and Private Power in Digital Markets: Rethinking the EU Competition Toolbox vis-à-vis Egalitarian Considerations

In a world shaped by networks and personalized interactions, using algorithms to identify and influence individual willingness to pay may become widespread. By focusing on distributive issues, this thesis examines the relationship between data-driven personalized pricing and new ways to understand economic power in digital markets. From a normative standpoint, it takes a resource-egalitarian basis to develop a regulatory theory for market ordering that reconciles the core values of economic freedom and equality of opportunity, to discuss legal and policy implications of discrimination mechanisms in the market economy. The findings lead to five desirable courses of action: restating equal treatment as a foundational principle of EU competition law on unilateral abuses; refocusing the dominance analysis from product markets to network systems; creating a legal category of power appropriate for B2B relations; creating a legal tool for market investigations that considers a sandbox approach; and introducing a remedial principle of collective bargaining action.