EKEmin Köksal
About

Academic economist and AI consultant.

I’m Emin Köksal — Associate Professor of Economics, Routledge author, and AI consultant. Twenty years of my work has been inside competition economics and digital regulation; the last few have been about rebuilding that same work around AI. I design AI workflows for competition and regulation teams at leading international law firms, train practitioners on next-generation legal AI platforms, and use AI to extend what economic and competition-law research can ask. The four pillars below are not four careers — they are one identity, viewed from four angles.

20+years in competition economics
50+publications
11+graduate courses taught
One identity, two tracks

Academic economist and AI consultant — in that order.

Most consultants oversell AI and undersell rigor. Most academics undersell urgency. I work the seam between the two.

The academic identity comes first because it has to. Twenty years inside competition cases, regulatory dossiers, platform economics, and climate policy is what makes the AI work mean anything. Without it, “AI workflow for legal teams” is generic; with it, every workflow knows what question it’s trying to answer.

The AI identity is what makes the academic work current. I don’t write about AI from the outside — I use it as a daily research and consulting tool, I design the prompts and playbooks personally before teaching them to anyone else, and my published research uses AI as a primary method, not a topic.

The order matters in voice, too: every page on this site leads with academic credibility, then shows the AI fluency on top. It’s the inverse of the usual consulting site, and it’s deliberate.

What I do

Four pillars, one body of work.

01
#academic

Academic Economics & Teaching

The original ground. A formal academic record in economics, sustained alongside active graduate-level teaching.

  • Associate Professorship in Economicsearned through the national associate professorship examination; the formal title that would enter a full university post at full Professor rank.
  • 50+ publicationsacross peer-reviewed journals and book chapters in economics, competition, and regulation.
  • Routledge co-editor— The Economics and Regulation of Digitalisation: The Case of Türkiye (Routledge, 2024), with M. Eroğlu and M. Finger.
  • Associate Editor-in-Chief, Competition and Regulation in Network Industries (SAGE Publishing), since 2018.
  • Graduate-level teaching at Bahçeşehir University and other institutions: Generative AI for Economic Analysis, Managerial Economics, Platform Business and Economics, Industrial Organization, Innovation & Competition Policy in Digital Markets, Economics of Climate Change, Law & Economics.
  • Recognised in the field as an academic economist working at the intersection of competition policy, regulation, and AI — particularly within the Turkish and international competition-law community.
02
#ai-strategy

AI Strategy & Workflow Design (for Organizations)

Translating frontier AI tools into reliable analytical infrastructure for competition, regulation, and economic-analysis teams. The work distinguishes carefully between general-purpose AI tools (for non-confidential academic and marketing work) and confidentiality-grade legal AI platforms (for client work).

What I deliver

  • AI workflow and playbook design for competition cases, regulatory dossiers, and economic analysis.
  • Legal AI platform enablement — practitioner training on next-generation European legal AI platforms: how to use them at depth, how to design playbooks that compound across matters, and how to integrate them into existing review and drafting flows.
  • Complex prompt and agent design — task-specific prompts, multi-step research agents, and reusable templates that raise output quality while saving time on repetitive analytical work.
  • MCP-based research infrastructure — custom Model Context Protocol setups that let practitioners run high-quality legal and academic discovery research from inside their AI tools.
  • Strategic AI adoption advisory for senior leadership — where AI actually moves the needle in a regulatory/economic practice, and where it doesn’t.
Where the work happens

Embedded inside the competition and regulation practice of a leading international law firm, designing AI workflows in production. Builds playbooks and trains practitioners on a leading European legal AI platform. The work is practitioner-built, not slide-deck.

03
#research

AI-Native Research

A distinct research program — not a single project. Using AI as a primary method to ask economic and competition-law questions that were previously infeasible at scale, and to contribute methodologically to how the literature itself uses these tools.

AI-powered analysis of legal corpora — turning regulatory text into research-grade economic evidence. Pairs large-scale legal-text analysis with citation networks and economic interpretation.

Flagship projects

Published, SSRN 2025 · with C. Peker and M. Uyer
AI analysis of 3,369 Turkish Competition Board decisions

A quarter-century of the Turkish Competition Board’s decisions, treated as a single coherent dataset. Combines NLP and economic methods to surface patterns invisible to manual review.

Forthcoming working paper
The Competition Board’s “Intellectual DNA”: A Citation Network and Case Law Mapping Analysis

Combining AI analysis of legal texts with citation network analysis to map how authority, precedent, and reasoning propagate through an agency’s case law over time.

AI doesn’t just speed up what an economist could already do. It changes the questions that can be asked. Treating the regulatory record as a structured, queryable corpus opens up research that simply wasn’t feasible a decade ago — and the literature is only beginning to use these methods seriously.

Explore the research
04

Public Thought Leadership

The external voice of the three pillars above — essays, conference talks, podcast appearances, and writing that translates research and practice into accessible writing for both academic and professional audiences.

Read the writing
Career story

Twenty years inside the questions, then rebuilt around AI.

My career began at Bahçeşehir University in 2002 as a research assistant. Over the next two decades, I moved through Assistant Professor, Vice Dean of the Faculty of Administrative and Economic Sciences, Program Coordinator of the Financial Economics Graduate Program, and Associate Professor — earning the formal Associate Professorship in Economics along the way.

Through that period, my academic work centered on industrial economics, competition policy, platform economics, and digital regulation. In 2015, I began working as Economic Consultant at a leading international law firm — providing expert economic analysis in competition law and regulatory matters across electricity, banking, telecoms, retail, cement, petroleum, and digital platforms. In 2018, I became Associate Editor-in-Chief of Competition and Regulation in Network Industries (SAGE Publishing). In 2024, I co-edited The Economics and Regulation of Digitalisation: The Case of Türkiye (Routledge).

Then came AI. Not as a topic to write about, but as a tool that genuinely changes how the work is done. I rebuilt my own research and consulting workflows around frontier AI tools — first to save time, then to ask questions that hadn’t been askable before. That rebuild is what the AI Strategy and AI-Native Research pillars on this site describe. I now design AI workflows for competition and regulation teams at leading international law firms, train practitioners on a leading European legal AI platform, build MCP-based research infrastructure for legal and academic discovery, and teach a graduate course on Generative AI for Economic Analysis — alongside the older courses I’ve been teaching for years.

Education: PhD in Economics, Marmara University (2008). MA in Public Finance, Galatasaray University (2004). BA in Economics, Galatasaray University (2001).

Affiliations

Where I serve.

  • Istanbul Center for Regulation (IC4R)
    Deputy Director
    2019 - 2024
  • Network-Industries.org
    Member
    since 2019
  • TÜSİAD (Turkish Industry & Business Association)
    Member of three working groups: Climate Change & Environment, Information and Communication Technologies, and E-commerce
    since 2018/2019
  • US-Turkey Business Council
    Member, Digital Economy Advisory Board
    2017 - 2018
  • International Atlantic Economic Society
    Lifetime Member
    since 2012
Off the page

A few things outside the work.

Based in Türkiye. Married. Keen gravel cyclist. Amateur astronomer. Available for remote collaboration worldwide.

Want to work together — or just compare notes?

I’m always glad to hear from practitioners in competition and regulation, fellow academics working on AI methods, journal editors, conference organizers, and anyone designing serious AI infrastructure for analytical work.