Call for Submissions: Digital Competition Conference 2026
On February 5-6, 2026 in Washington, DC, the Knight-Georgetown Institute (KGI), the Yale Tobin Center’s Digital Economy Project, and Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP) will co-host the Digital Competition Conference 2026, an annual policy and research event that explores the lessons, challenges, and opportunities of competition regulation and enforcement in digital markets. The conference brings together researchers, policymakers, businesses, litigators, and civil society for evidence-driven dialogue about business practices that may pose unfair competition risks, possible remedies, and areas for future analysis.
Submit your paper here.
Hardly a day passes without competition regulation or enforcement involving tech companies appearing in news headlines. In the US, a variety of federal and state cases against tech firms are moving forward, with several remedial orders recently or soon-to-be issued and inevitable appeals on the horizon. Meanwhile, private litigation winds its way through the courts in parallel. In Europe, the European Commission has initiated its first round of enforcement actions under the Digital Markets Act (DMA). The UK Competition and Markets Authority has also published its first designations under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act. From Japan to South Korea to Brazil and beyond, competition authorities are adopting or considering DMA-style regimes. Given the worldwide reach of tech firms, analyzing the impact of these developments within and across jurisdictions is crucial for policymaking worldwide.
The Digital Competition Conference 2026 will bring together researchers, policy experts, regulators, litigators, industry, and civil society representatives to gain a shared understanding of the latest research, analysis, and experiences with direct applicability to tech competition regulation and enforcement. Discussion will center on research results and methods, what stakeholders know and still need to learn about competition challenges and remedies, and how to create a virtuous cycle where research more effectively informs policymaking and enforcement while regulation enables more effective research. The conference will feature research talks and policy discussions focused on a range of technology markets, including markets for search, browsers, advertising, social networking, app stores, messaging, connected devices, and AI-powered consumer services.
We are soliciting expressions of interest in participation, which may be early/draft research papers, prepublication papers, or recent or accepted publications. The program committee will select and curate research talks at the conference out of the submissions received. We expect to post accepted submissions on our website prior to the conference with authors’ consent.
Research talks at the conference will be short and should illuminate competition issues, remedies, or research methods. Selected speakers will be asked to stimulate dialogue about the practical application of research findings to policymaking and enforcement. The conference is open to all disciplines, including economics, psychology, computer science, public policy, and law.
We welcome submissions broadly related to competition in technology markets, including on the following topics:
- Effectiveness and impact of existing competition regulation of digital platforms
- How business practices affect competitors and consumers in technology markets, and how possible regulatory requirements or enforcement remedies would shift markets.
- The impacts of technology competition regulation and enforcement actions, including changes in firm behavior, market structure, and consumer experiences.
- How new or changing technologies may pose novel competition issues.
- The effectiveness of and further opportunities for platform data sharing and experimentation requirements.
- Institutional implementation of and compliance with competition regulation.
- Comparison of policy, regulation, and enforcement across jurisdictions, with associated learnings.
The program committee will prioritize research submissions that involve new observational or experimental methods or results. Because there is presently limited technology competition research of this type, submissions may be in adjacent areas (e.g., technology-related consumer protection research on dark patterns or privacy regulation compliance), provided that the submitters are prepared to discuss how their methods and results could be applied and extended to competition challenges and remedies if they are selected.
Submit your paper here.
Travel reimbursement will be available for invited conference speakers.
Conference timeline:
- Submissions due: October 13, 2025
- Speakers notified: November 10, 2025
- Speaker registrations due: November 21, 2025
- Conference dates: February 5-6, 2026
Program committee:
- Alissa Cooper, Knight-Georgetown Institute
- Ariel Ezrachi, University of Oxford
- Eric Rescorla, Knight-Georgetown Institute
- Filippo Lancieri, Georgetown University
- Fiona Scott Morton, Yale University
- Jonathan Mayer, Princeton University
- Leon Musolff, University of Pennsylvania
- Tracy Xu, Knight-Georgetown Institute
- Zander Arnao, Knight-Georgetown Institute
Contact:
Feel free to reach out to the program committee at kgi-pc@georgetown.edu with questions.