EKEmin Köksal
Research

AI-native economic research

Using AI as a primary method to ask economic and competition-law questions that were previously infeasible at scale

Plenty of researchers write about AI. I’d rather use it. Over the past few years I’ve rebuilt part of my research practice around frontier AI tools: large-scale analysis of legal texts, citation-network mapping, and economic interpretation of regulatory corpora. The projects below are the result. The publication record underneath shows where the questions come from.

Method

AI-powered analysis of legal corpora — turning regulatory text into research-grade economic evidence

The method pairs three things:

  1. 01

    Large-scale AI analysis of legal texts.

    Treat a national authority’s full decision record as a single queryable dataset, then use AI to extract concepts, parties, holdings, and reasoning patterns at a granularity manual review can’t reach.

  2. 02

    Citation network analysis.

    Map how authority, precedent, and reasoning move through a body of decisions over time, turning a flat case list into an intellectual genealogy.

  3. 03

    Economic interpretation.

    Use economics — industrial organization, competition theory, regulatory economics — to make sense of what the first two steps surface, and to find the next question.

The combination is what makes the work AI-native rather than AI-flavored: each step depends on the others, and none works as well alone.

Flagship projects

Two projects, one program

Published· SSRN, 2025

A Quarter-Century Analysis of the Turkish Competition Board’s Decisions

Co-authors · with C. Peker and M. Uyer

We took all 3,369 decisions the Turkish Competition Board published over roughly twenty-five years and analyzed them as one dataset — something nobody had done before. Combining NLP and economic analysis, the paper traces how the Board has reasoned, ruled, and shifted across industries and decision types over a quarter-century. Patterns that would take a team months to find by hand show up in days.

The dataset itself is part of the contribution. Building it opened the door to a research program, including the citation network study below.

Why it matters

  • It shows that a national agency’s full decision record can be treated as a research-grade dataset.
  • It maps how the agency’s practice has moved across industries and over time.
  • And it makes a larger claim. As we put it in the paper: “this research demonstrates the potential of large language models to open up new avenues of inquiry in text-intensive disciplines such as law and economics.”
Forthcoming· Working paper

The Competition Board’s “Intellectual DNA”

Working title: The Competition Board’s “Intellectual DNA”: A Citation Network and Case Law Mapping Analysis.

The follow-up to the 2025 paper. This study combines AI analysis of legal texts with citation network analysis to map how reasoning, precedent, and authority move through the Board’s case law over time. The goal is to make the agency’s “intellectual DNA” — its citation backbone, its conceptual lineages, the points where doctrine shifts — visible as a graph rather than an anecdote.

Methodologically, the paper sits at the crossing of two techniques that competition-law research rarely uses together: AI-assisted extraction of structured information from regulatory text at scale, and network analysis of the resulting citation web. Nothing like it exists for the Turkish setting, and there are few examples anywhere.

Why it matters

  • It treats a competition authority’s case law as a system with traceable internal structure.
  • The template travels: other competition authorities, sectoral regulators, and court systems could be mapped the same way.
  • It sets up the next questions: where does the agency’s reasoning calcify, where does it shift, and what do those shifts correlate with — leadership, political context, industry events?
Selected publications

Where the questions come from

The AI-native work above grows out of twenty years of research on competition policy, network industries, and digital regulation. A curated subset is below; the full list lives on the CV page.

Books & edited volumes

  • 2024

    Eroğlu, M., Finger, M., & Köksal, E. (Eds.). (2024). The Economics and Regulation of Digitalisation: The Case of Türkiye. Routledge.

  • 2024

    Köksal, E., & Bakış, O. (2024). Digitalization of Society — Türkiye Digital Society Index. In The Economics and Regulation of Digitalisation (pp. 136–154). Routledge.

  • 2024

    Finger, M., Köksal, E., & Eroğlu, M. (2024). Setting the Scene. In The Economics and Regulation of Digitalisation (pp. 1–20). Routledge.

Selected peer-reviewed journal articles

  • 2022

    Köksal, E. & Ardıyok, Ş. (2022). Turkish Competition Authority’s First Hub-and-Spoke Cartel Decision. Journal of European Competition Law & Practice, 13(8), 566–570.

  • 2019

    Aydınonat, N. E. & Köksal, E. (2019). Explanatory Value in Context: The Curious Case of Hotelling’s Location Model. The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 26(5), 879–910.

  • 2018

    Köksal, E. & Ardıyok, Ş. (2018). Regulatory and Market Disharmony in the Turkish Electricity Industry. Utilities Policy, 55, 90–98.

  • 2018

    Köksal, E. & Ardıyok, Ş. (2018). Diverging Approaches in Europe for the Most Favoured-Customer Clauses: How Turkish Competition Authority’s Decision for the Online Food Ordering Market Contributed. Journal of European Competition Law & Practice, 9(2), 119–123.

  • 2016

    Gürakar, E. & Köksal, E. (2016). Institutional Evolution and Economic Development in Iran and Turkey. Middle East Development Journal, 8(1), 32–64.

  • 2015

    Köksal, E. & Ardıyok, Ş. (2015). Reviewing Regulatory Policy for Broadband in Turkey. Competition and Regulation in Network Industries, 16(4), 354–377.

  • 2011

    Köksal, E. (2011). Network Neutrality and Quality of Service: A Two-Sided Market Analysis. International Journal of Management and Network Economics, 2(1), 39–57.

Selected book chapters

  • 2024

    Köksal, E. & Ak, A. (2024). Neo-Brandeisian Traces in the New E-Commerce Act. On İki Levha. (in Turkish)

  • 2023

    Köksal, E., İkiler, B., & Canbeyli, A. (2023). Law and Economics of the 2021 Retail Decision. On İki Levha. (in Turkish)

  • 2021

    Köksal, E. (2021). Regulation of Fiber and the Internet. In Finger & Eroğlu (Eds.), Regulation of Turkish Network Industries (pp. 383–401). Springer.

Selected reports & working papers

  • 2025

    Köksal, E., Peker, C. & Uyer, M. (2025). A Quarter-Century Analysis of the Turkish Competition Board’s Decisions: An AI-Supported Examination. SSRN.

  • 2023

    Köksal, E. & Bakış, O. (2023). Türkiye Digital Society Index. Betam Research Note, 23/269.

  • 2022

    Bakış, O., Tetikol-Dalgıç, D. E., Deniz, P., Finger, M., Gümüş, İ., & Köksal, E. (2022). Assessment of a Carbon Tax as a Tool to Decarbonize Türkiye’s Energy Supply 2050. IC4R Report Series No. 1.

Full publication list: /cv.

Active interests

Active interests

  • Generative AI and economics — research methods, agentic workflows, AI-assisted analysis of legal and regulatory corpora.

  • Industrial economics & competition policy — competition cases, theory of harm, market definition, cartels, vertical restraints.

  • Platform economics & digital regulation — multi-sided markets, platform governance, digital market regulation.

  • Digitalization — measurement, policy, structural change.

  • Climate economics — carbon pricing, decarbonization, regulation.

Collaborating on AI-native economic or legal research?

If you work on AI methods for legal or regulatory text, on citation networks, on competition-policy research, or on research infrastructure for economists and lawyers — send me a note. There aren’t many of us yet.