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

I’m Emin Köksal — Associate Professor of Economics , based in Türkiye. I’ve spent twenty years in competition economics and digital regulation: teaching, publishing, editing a journal, and advising law firms on cases. A few years ago I began rebuilding that work around AI. Now I design AI workflows for competition and regulation teams, train practitioners on legal AI platforms, and run a research program that uses AI as its method. This page is the longer version of that story.

Consultants who talk about AI tend to skip the hard part: knowing which questions matter. Academics who study it often stop short of using it. I’ve tried to hold on to both.

The economics comes first because it has to. Twenty years of competition cases, regulatory dossiers, and platform economics is what tells an AI workflow which question it should answer. Without that, a “legal AI workflow” is a template anyone could sell.

The AI side keeps the economics current. I use these tools every day, in research and in client work. I write the prompts and playbooks myself before I teach them to anyone. And my recent papers use AI as their method, with the regulatory record itself as the data.

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 Doçentlik (Associate Professorship in Economics) along the way.

The research centered on industrial economics, competition policy, platform economics, and digital regulation. In 2015, I began working as Economic Consultant at Dentons, providing expert economic analysis in competition 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. I started with the obvious uses — summarizing, drafting, saving time — and kept going until the tools were doing real analytical work. That rebuild is what the AI Strategy and AI-Native Research pillars on this site describe. These days I design AI workflows for competition and regulation teams, train practitioners on a leading European legal AI platform, build MCP-based research infrastructure, and teach a graduate course on Generative AI for Economic Analysis — alongside the 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).

I live at the intersection of the Aegean and the Mediterranean. Off the page, it’s gravel cycling and amateur astronomy — two hobbies that reward patience and good instruments. I collaborate remotely worldwide.