Getting over market definition: The NVIDIA/Arm merger

Economists Thomas Bowman, Thibaut de Bernard and Guillaume Duquesne co-authored a paper for Concurrences on market definition. The authors argue that traditional approaches towards market definition need to be adapted for digital ecosystems, and discuss a practical application to the recent NVIDIA/Arm merger.

Abstract

Understanding competition between ecosystems is increasingly important in competition cases concerning digital markets. This article contributes to the debate on reforming the traditional approach to market definition in digital markets, calling for an increased focus on indirect ecosystem constraints.
The recent abandoned NVIDIA/Arm merger is explored to illustrate the practical pilaffs of the traditional approach to market definition.

Introduction

Competition in the digital economy is increasingly a competition between ecosystems. The difficulty for market definition is to account for the various layers of inter- and intra- ecosystem competition to capture the essentials of competition in each specific case. In this paper, we argue that traditional approaches to market definition needs to be adapted for digital ecosystems and discuss a practical application: the recent NVIDIA/Arm merger.

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This article was originally published by Concurrences here (subscription required). The views expressed in this paper are the sole responsibility of the author and cannot be attributed to Compass Lexecon or any other parties.