The Faculty of Business and Economics congratulates Professor Byrne on his successful Australian Research Council Future Fellowship application for ‘Informational Foundations of Monopoly Power in the Digital Age’.
The only successful applicant nationally for the 2025 ARC Future Fellowship in the Economics FOR code (FOR Code 38), his project aims to determine how digital information-sharing affects demand, pricing, competition, and welfare.
Using the retail fuel industry as a real-world laboratory, this project expects to generate new knowledge on the informational foundations of monopoly power by combining unique large-scale, real-time datasets on firm and consumer behaviour, field experiments, and theoretical models. Expected outcomes include new economic frameworks for quantifying the competitive effects of digital information sharing. These frameworks should yield substantial economic and social benefits through new policy instruments to detect and disrupt anticompetitive conduct to ensure systemic competition—and not collusion—emerges in the digital age.
The Australian Research Council has awarded the project $1.27 million of funding over four years. Of 664 applications this year, 100 Future Fellowships were awarded with the University of Melbourne's success rate rising from 9.8% to 11.2% overall, with the Faculty of Business and Economics receiving its first Future Fellowship since the FT20 (2019) scheme round.
Professor Byrne is the Deputy Head of the Department of Economics, holds the Ritchie Chair of Economic Research, and is a member of the Australian Competition Tribunal. His research includes empirical research in industrial organisation and behavioural economics, with a focus on digital, energy, and resource markets.
He is an associate editor of the International Journal of Industrial Organization and executive committee member of the Asia-Pacific Industrial Organization Society and the European Association for Research in Industrial Economics.
In 2023, he received the Young Economist of the Year Award from the Economic Society of Australia for his research and policy impact achievements.
Competition and Consumer Protection in the Digital Economy workshop
Join Professor Byrne, the Department of Economics, Melbourne Business School, and the Department of Management and Marketing for the 'Competition and Consumer Protection in the Digital Economy' workshop on 5 August 2025.
- 'Manipulation, Market Power, and Mergers in Digital Markets': This panel will be moderated by Professor David Byrne (University of Melbourne) and will include Professor Anthony Dukes (University of Southern California), George Siolis (Partner, RBB Economics), Simone Wong (Principal Economist, ACCC), and Dr Tiffany Tsai (National University of Singapore).
- 'Fooled by Choice? Marketing, Self-Deception and Consumer Protection': Professor Anthony Dukes, an expert in marketing and antitrust, specialising in e-commerce and digital platforms, will deliver this keynote address. He has also served as an expert witness in US federal court on matters related to antitrust and pricing discrimination. His keynote draws on behavioural economics and legal theory to explore why consumers continue to respond to questionable marketing. Through examples such as craft beer, cosmetics and greenwashing, he offers practical insights for those shaping consumer protection, advertising law, regulation, and litigation strategy.
- 'Platform Self-Preferencing and Information Advantages': Dr Tiffany Tsai will present a session drawing on her research on the role of intermediation and information asymmetry in online retailing and digital platforms.