ZWeR 2026, 189
Ordo-Liberalism for the Digital Age – Heike Schweitzer’s “Decentralized Coordination Order”
This contribution celebrates the achievements and salutes the memory of a most friendly and inspiring colleague, Heike Schweitzer, whom we all dearly miss. Before her untimely passing, Heike had embarked on a journey to recast the ordo-liberal tradition, of which she was a rightful heir, in the context of the digital age. The central element in that endeavour had been her 2020 article “Vertragsfreiheit, Marktregulierung, Marktverfassung: Privatrecht als dezentrale Koordinationsordnung”,1 upon which this contribution will build.
In this contribution, I review the main lines in Schweitzer’s analysis (I.), with focus on an undertheorized element, namely the role of market failure (II.). This leads me to present a matrix of market theories (III.) to assist in dealing with a central challenge identified by Schweitzer, namely the significance and impact of matchmaking by platforms and agentic AI (IV.). With the help of the matrix, I point to two shortcomings in the emerging literature on that issue, relating to distributional and dynamic effects of markets (V.), before adding to Schweitzer’s analysis in conclusion (VI.).
Contents
- I. Heike Schweitzer’s recast of ordo-liberalism
- II. Market failure as the linchpin between law and economics
- III. A matrix of market theories
- IV. Matchmaking and the advent of agentic AI
- V. Implications for the economic order (“Ordnung”)
- 1. Distributional effects
- 2. Dynamic effects
- VI. Conclusion
- *
- *)Professor of Law, Faculty of Law, Université de Montréal, Research Fellow, IVADO and Senior Fellow, Centre on Regulation in Europe (CERRE), BrusselsClaude Sonnet 4.6. was used for research support and assistance, but I remain solely responsible for the content. This contribution builds on earlier work, including “Artificial Intelligence and Competition”, in D. Crane, D. Gerard and R. Tritell, ed., "Why Competition? Voices from the Antitrust Community and Beyond", Concurrences, 2024, 469 – 478. I am grateful to the audience at the MaCCI Law and Economics Conference “Advances in Competition Law and Policy – Heike Schweitzer in memoriam” held on 23 – 24 October 2025 in Mannheim for their comments, with special thanks to Wolfgang Kerber.
- 1
- 1)H. Schweitzer, Vertragsfreiheit, Marktregulierung, Marktverfassung: Privatrecht als dezentrale Koordinationsordnung, (2020) 220 AcP 554 – 586 (“Freedom of Contract, Market Regulation, Market Constitution: Private Law as a Decentralized Coordination Order”, hereafter: DKO).
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