About

Daniel Sokol is the Carolyn Craig Franklin Chair in Law and an affiliated Professor of Marketing at USC Marshall School of Business. His work focuses on the interface of law and business across multiple dimensions, including antitrust, data breaches, corporate governance, compliance, innovation, mergers and acquisitions, technological transformation, and platforms. He is recognized as one of the top 10 most cited antitrust law professors in the past five years. Sokol has edited ten books and his scholarly articles have been published in prominent journals such as the Strategic Management Journal, Journal of Law and Economics, Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, and various law and economics journals. He actively contributes to public discourse through op-eds and media appearances, addressing issues like digital competition, trade policies, and antitrust enforcement. Sokol's expertise and research significantly influence the fields of law and business, particularly in areas related to digital markets and competition policy.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Business
• Computer Security
• Internet privacy
• Accounting
• Public relations
• Economics
• Industrial organization
• Finance
• Advertising
• Biology
• Law
• Engineering
• Marketing
• World Wide Web

Selected publications

• Medical ethics education must not end at graduation

  BMJ · 2026-05-12

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Institutional Adaptation and Technological Shock: The Role of AI Regulation in Influencing Startup Financing

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• The Impact of AI on Competition Across Business Functions

  Management and business review. · 2025-12-01

  articleSenior author

  Maxime C. Cohen and D. Daniel Sokol explore how AI is fundamentally reshaping competition through major business functions including marketing, operations, finance, and strategy. For both startups and established companies, AI tools lower barriers to entry and accelerate decision-making.

  PublisherDOI

• Control Capture and Competition

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• The Impact of AI on Competition Across Business Functions 

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Antitrust Platform Regulation and Entrepreneurship: Evidence from China

  Management Science · 2025-11-07 · 3 citations

  article

  Many jurisdictions have launched antitrust enforcement and brought in regulation of large tech platforms. The swift and strict implementation of China’s Anti-Monopoly Guidelines for the Platform Economy (Platform Guidelines) provides a quasi-natural experiment to evaluate the impact of antitrust regulation on platform competition. We adopt a difference-in-differences approach to empirically explore the impact of China’s Platform Guidelines on the number of investments and the entry of startups in platform markets. The results show that the Platform Guidelines did not increase entrepreneurship in these affected markets. Rather, entrepreneurship weakened in these markets, with less venture capital investment flowing into them and fewer startups entering these markets. Our study suggests that governments should consider more carefully the potential unintended consequences of antitrust platform regulation. This paper was accepted by D. J. Wu, information systems. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2024.04397 .

  PublisherDOI

• Complementarities, Network Effects, and the Antitrust Puzzle of Platform M&A 

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Medical students are not invisible, patients are watching closely

  BMJ · 2025-08-22

  editorialOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The author and barrister John Mortimer once quipped that "no brilliance is required in law, just common sense and relatively clean fingernails." 1 I was reminded of this quote on a visit to my GP for a check-up.A medical student was present, and, when the doctor asked them to examine my cubical fossa, I noticed their long, dirty fingernails

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• An ethicist’s view on the resident doctors’ strikes

  BMJ · 2025-11-17 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Why the General Medical Council should discipline doctors who misuse social media

  BMJ · 2025-02-14

  editorialOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  the General Medical Council's guidance on doctors' use of social media came into effect.At paragraph 14 it reads: "You must not use social media to abuse, discriminate against, bully, harass or deliberately target any individual or group." 1 This rule falls under the broader category of "Behaving professionally and maintaining boundaries.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Vivek Ghosal

  Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

  18 shared

• Ioannis Lianos

  16 shared

• Roger D. Blair

  University of Florida

  14 shared

• Chirantan Chatterjee

  8 shared

• Thomas K. Cheng

  7 shared

• William E. Kovacic

  5 shared

• Maia Crook

  University of Florida

  5 shared

• D. Gordon Smith

  4 shared

Education

• LL.M, Law

  University of Wisconsin Madison

  2007

• JD, Law

  University of Chicago

  2001

• MSt., Modern History

  University of Oxford

  1997

• BA

  Amherst College

  1996