IJIO Special issue on Artificial Intelligence and Industrial Organization

Artificial intelligence is reshaping how marketplaces are organized, how firms compete, and the sources and limits of market power. Decisions that industrial organization has traditionally studied are increasingly made by, or delegated to, algorithms; these algorithms also mediate interactions among firms.

The IJIO plans to publish a special issue on “Artificial Intelligence and Industrial Organization.” We invite papers that examine artificial intelligence as a transformative force. We welcome both theoretical and empirical contributions, as well as papers oriented toward the policy debate.

Our aim is to bring the perspective, methods, and discipline of industrial organization to bear on these developments, and to build conceptual foundations that will outlast any particular generation of technology.

We particularly welcome papers that conceptualize artificial intelligence rather than papers whose contribution is tied to specific versions of the tools deployed today, unless highly relevant to an ongoing debate. Our goal is to publish work with lasting relevance.

Within that spirit, we also welcome speculative and forward-looking contributions, including work that speaks to the debate in competition policy and the broader role of AI in the economy, or that maps the current state of the industry in order to anticipate where it is heading, provided they are disciplined by economic reasoning.

We encourage submission of any paper from the field of IO that studies artificial intelligence, broadly defined. This encompasses a large range of topics, including but not limited to:

We encourage submission of any paper from the field of IO that studies artificial intelligence, broadly defined. This encompasses a large range of topics, including but not limited to:

●  Entry and industry structure. How AI is changing barriers to entry and shaping industry structure, lowering entry costs in some markets while raising scale, data, or compute requirements in others.

●  The organization of supply. How firms strategically delegate their choices to algorithms or integrate AI into their internal processes, and how that reshapes the way they participate in marketplaces.

●  Data as a competitive asset. Data-driven feedback loops, learning-by-doing, and data- based economies of scale and scope as sources of durable advantage and entry barriers.

●  Platforms and the institutions of exchange. How platforms and other institutions that organize exchange are incorporating these tools, and how that alters intermediation and matching.

●  AI on the demand side. How AI systems that search, compare, and choose on consumers’ behalf affect the intensity of competition, and how firms respond when they face algorithmic rather than human buyers.

●  Advertising, recommendation, and attention. How recommender systems and AI- driven ad auctions shape what consumers see and buy, and how intermediaries compete for attention.

●  Personalization and price discrimination. AI-enabled targeting, personalized pricing, and steering, and their consequences for welfare and its distribution.

●  Algorithmic pricing and tacit collusion. Whether pricing algorithms can sustain supra- competitive outcomes, and what this implies for competition policy and enforcement.

●  Competition in the AI stack. Competition within the AI industry, both within and across the compute, model, data, and application layers, including the potential for foreclosure and bottlenecks between layers.

●  Labor, monopsony, and talent. How AI revives concerns such as monopsony power in labor markets, alongside the distinct problem of scarce and concentrated AI talent as an

input into market power.

●  Innovation and technical change. How AI reshapes the innovation process itself, R&D competition, and the incentives for and direction of technical change.

These are only examples. The goal of the special issue is to encourage IO economists to address a broad range of questions about how artificial intelligence is transforming markets.