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.

Most discussions about AI in research treat it as a topic — something to study, regulate, or comment on. I treat it as a method. Over the past few years, I’ve been rebuilding parts of my research practice around frontier AI tools: large-scale legal-text analysis, citation network mapping, and AI-assisted economic interpretation of regulatory corpora. The published and forthcoming work below is the result. The older publication record below shows where the questions come from.

Method

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

The signature method pairs three things:

  1. 01

    Large-scale AI analysis of legal texts.

    Treating a national authority’s full decision record (or another structured regulatory corpus) as a single queryable dataset, then using AI to extract concepts, parties, holdings, and reasoning patterns at a level of granularity that manual review cannot reach.

  2. 02

    Citation network analysis.

    Mapping how authority, precedent, and reasoning propagate through a body of decisions over time — turning a flat case list into a structured intellectual genealogy.

  3. 03

    Economic interpretation.

    Using economics — industrial organization, competition theory, regulatory economics — to make sense of the patterns the first two steps surface, and to ask the next research question.

The combination is what makes the work AI-native rather than AI-flavored: each step depends on the others, and none of them 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

An AI-supported examination of 3,369 decisions of the Turkish Competition Board, spanning roughly twenty-five years. The paper combines NLP and economic analysis to surface patterns — across industries, decision types, and over time — that would have taken months to identify manually and that have not, to our knowledge, been mapped at this scale before.

The dataset itself is part of the contribution: the Turkish Competition Board’s decision record had never been treated as a single coherent corpus for economic research. Building it that way opens the door to a research program — including the citation network study below.

Why it matters

  • Demonstrates the feasibility of treating a national agency’s full decision record as a research-grade dataset.
  • Surfaces patterns in how the agency has reasoned, ruled, and shifted across industries over a quarter-century.
  • Establishes a methodological foundation for follow-up work using citation networks and economic interpretation.
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.

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

Methodologically, the paper sits at the intersection of two underused techniques in competition-law research: (1) AI-assisted extraction of structured information from regulatory text at scale, and (2) network analysis of the resulting citation web. The combination is, to our knowledge, novel in the Turkish setting and rare internationally.

Why it matters

  • Treats a competition authority’s case law as a system with traceable internal structure, not as a flat list of decisions.
  • Provides a methodological template that could be applied to other national competition authorities, sectoral regulators, or court systems.
  • Sets up downstream questions: where does the agency’s reasoning calcify, where does it shift, and how do those shifts correlate with leadership, political context, or industry events?
Selected publications

Where the questions come from.

The AI-native research above grows out of twenty years of work on competition policy, network industries, and digital regulation. A curated subset of that record 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

Where the work is going.

  • 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/regulatory text, on citation networks, on competition-policy research, or on building research infrastructure that economists and lawyers can actually use — I’d like to hear from you.