D. Daniel Sokol focuses his teaching and scholarship on complex business issues from early stage start-ups to large, multinational businesses and the issues that businesses face: antitrust, data breaches, corporate governance, compliance, innovation, M&A, collusion, technological transformation, and global business regulation. He is a member of the American Law Institute. He also serves as academic advisor to the United States Chamber of Commerce and as a non-governmental Advisor to the International Competition Network. His work has appeared in a variety of journals: Strategic Management Journal, Journal of Law and Economics, Harvard Business Review, Sloan Business Review, Michigan Law Review and Northwestern Law Review, among others. Prior to joining USC, Sokol taught at the University of Florida. He also has taught, among other institutions, at the Catholic University of Chile, University of Melbourne, University of Haifa, University of Tokyo and Northwestern University. Sokol is among the top 10 most cited antitrust law professors in the past five years. He also has testified or presented his work to antitrust authorities and practitioner groups in the U.S. and around the world in addition to presenting his work to academic audiences.
2021 Compliance
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Advocacy Versus Enforcement in Antitrust Compliance ProgramsThis article focuses on the question of why firms self-regulate to avoid more severe public regulation in the area of antitrust compliance. We distinguish the effects of an antitrust authority’s outreach and enforcement on firms’ adoption of antitrust compliance programs. Furthermore, we examine the mechanism that may drive an antitrust authority’s actions on firms’ decisions to adopt compliance programs. Using a two-year survey of 432 firms drawn from the top three hundred Taiwanese enterprises and applying mediation analysis, we find that “voluntary” self-regulation actions, encouraged by the antitrust authority to promote compliance programs via advocacy, significantly increase the creation of antitrust compliance programs. Moreover, “coercive” actions of the antitrust authority in terms of enforcement are less effective than voluntary actions for firms’ compliance programs creation. Within “coercive” actions, large fines are more likely to lead to the adoption of antitrust compliance programs relative to other forms of government prosecution.
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Understanding AI Collusion and ComplianceChanges in technology and the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-learning create new possibilities both for anti-competitive behavior and to aid in detection of such algorithmic collusion. To some extent, AI collusion takes traditional ideas of collusion and simply provides a technological overlay to them. However, in some instances, the mechanisms of both collusion and detection can be transformed using AI. This handbook chapter discusses existing theoretical and empirical work and identifies research gaps as well as avenues for new scholarship on how firms or competition authorities might invest in AI compliance to improve detection of wrongdoing.
