Emin Köksal
About

Twenty years an economist | The last few rebuilding the work around AI

I am Emin Köksal, an economist and Associate Professor based in Türkiye. Competition and regulation have been my subject for twenty years: I teach them, publish on them, edit a journal about them, and since 2015 I have advised on them from inside a law firm. A few years ago I started rebuilding that work around AI. It began in my own research, where the tools saved me time, and spread to the teams I work with, where they now do real analytical work.

20+years in competition economics
50+publications
1000slegal documents analyzed with AI
11+courses taught
One identity, two tracks

Academic economist and AI consultant, in that order

The economics comes first because it has to. An AI tool will answer whatever question it is given, quickly and with great confidence. Knowing which question a competition case turns on takes twenty years of cases, dossiers, and papers, and that knowledge is what a workflow is built around. Without it, a “legal AI workflow” is a template anyone could sell.

The AI half keeps the economics current. I use these tools every day, in research and in client work, and I write the prompts and playbooks myself before I teach them to anyone. My recent papers go a step further: AI is the method, and the regulatory record itself is the data.

What I do

Four pillars, one body of work

01
#academic

Academic Economics & Teaching

Where it all started. I have taught every year since 2002. When the subject is Becker’s economics of crime, I open with Ocean’s Eleven: the heist is a cost-benefit calculation, and students remember it long after the equation.

  • Associate Professor of Economics, working on competition policy, platform economics, and digital regulation.
  • 50+ publications across 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.
  • University teaching at Bahçeşehir University and other institutions, from undergraduate to MBA and PhD: 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.
02
#ai-strategy

AI Strategy & Workflow Design (for Organizations)

I work with competition, regulation, and economic-analysis teams on the AI side of their daily work. The first question is always where the data goes. Public and academic material can run through general-purpose tools; client material runs only on a confidentiality-grade legal AI platform. I hold that line strictly.

What I deliver

  • AI workflow and playbook design for competition cases, regulatory dossiers, and economic analysis.
  • Practitioner training on legal AI platforms: how to go beyond the chat box, and how to build playbooks the next matter can reuse.
  • Complex prompt and agent design: task-specific prompts, multi-step research agents, reusable templates.
  • MCP-based research infrastructure: custom Model Context Protocol setups for legal and academic research, run from inside the tools practitioners already use.
  • Advice for partners and senior management: where AI earns its cost in a regulatory or economic practice, and where it does not.
Where the work happens

Since 2015 I have worked inside the competition and regulation practice of a leading international law firm. The workflows I design run there first, on live matters. If a playbook does not survive contact with a real case, it does not get taught.

03
#research

AI-Native Research

What began as one paper has become a research program: using AI to ask competition-law and economics questions that were too large to ask before.

AI-powered analysis of legal corpora: regulatory text turned into economic evidence. Pairs large-scale legal-text analysis with citation networks and economic interpretation.

Flagship projects

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

A quarter-century of the Board’s infringement decisions, treated as a single coherent dataset. Combines NLP and economic methods to find patterns no manual review could.

Published, SSRN 2026 · with C. Peker and M. Üyer
The Intellectual DNA of the Turkish Competition Board

Maps the 18,513 citations connecting all 9,995 published decisions: thirty years of case law, drawn as a network.

Treating the regulatory record as a structured, queryable corpus does more than save time: it changes which questions are worth asking. The literature is only beginning to use these methods seriously.

Explore the research
04

Writing & Talks

I have written for a general audience since 2013, mostly in Turkish, on competition cases, platform regulation, climate policy, and now AI. The whole archive is on this site. I also give conference talks and the occasional podcast interview, in English and Turkish.

Read the writing
Career story

How I got here

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.

My research centered on industrial economics, competition policy, platform economics, and digital regulation. In 2015 I began working with Dentons as Economic Consultant, and the cases came from across the economy: electricity, banking, telecoms, retail, cement, petroleum, digital platforms. Three years later I became Associate Editor-in-Chief of Competition and Regulation in Network Industries (SAGE Publishing), and in 2024 I co-edited The Economics and Regulation of Digitalisation: The Case of Türkiye for Routledge.

Then came AI. At first I only wanted to save time: summaries, first drafts, the obvious uses. I kept going until the tools were doing real analytical work. These days I design AI workflows for competition and regulation teams, train practitioners on a leading European legal AI platform, and build MCP-based research infrastructure. At Bahçeşehir I added an undergraduate course, Generative AI for Economic Analysis, to the ones I have taught 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
    since 2019
  • Network-Industries.org
    Member
    since 2019
  • TÜSİAD (Turkish Industry & Business Association)
    Member of three working groups: Climate Change & Environment (since 2019), Information and Communication Technologies (since 2018), and E-commerce (since 2018)
  • US-Turkey Business Council
    Member, Digital Economy Advisory Board
    since 2017
  • International Atlantic Economic Society
    Lifetime Member
    since 2012
Off the page

A few things outside the work

I live at the intersection of the Aegean and the Mediterranean. Away from work I ride gravel bikes and do amateur astronomy, two hobbies that reward patience and good instruments.

Want to work together, or just compare notes?

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