Research On What Influence Big Data Can Bring To Market Power Under The Perspective Of Competition Law

With the development of data-driven economy,data or big data has already been essential input to compete for most companies.Companies could stand firm in the market and be competitive with the help of big data.Under this background,there are more discussions about whether big data could be a competition concern.This paper divides into the following four parts.In the first part,this paper introduces the development of big data which illustrate what role big data plays in business activities.Whether the competition enforcement agency should consider the big data in investigations induces big attentions.Therefore,this part will talk about the correlations between big data and competition enforcement and several business practices related big data that might exclude or limit competition.In the second part,as the essential part of this paper,this part is going to discuss how big data could influence the company's market power.There are three parts to talk about this problem: how big data could influence data owner's market power,how big data could influence data owner's competitors' market data and the response of end users and customers.To illustrate this problem more intuitively,this paper choose a perspective of internet finance industry.At the same time,this paper will also talk about the availability of data,the scope and scale of data colleting,the substitutability of data,network effects,multi-homing and some other important issues.In the third part,this paper is going to talk about privacy protection of big data.Competition law experts are going to pay attention to whether data-driven companies would abuse their dominant position to decrease privacy protection standards,or whether they would misuse personal data after business merger,which will harm the customers' welfare and limit the competition of privacy protection.In the final part,this paper will talk about the circumstances of China.We think that the issue of big data deserves the concern of competition enforcement agency,but competition enforcement agency should pay more attention to play a role as a supervisor.It should enforce the competition law prudently and deal better with the relationship between innovation and competition.