Fresh from a trip to Boston and back home in L.A., USC Gould School of Law Professor D. Daniel Sokol is keeping his suitcase handy this semester.
He’ll be traveling back and forth to the East Coast a lot.
Sokol, who specializes in the intersection of business, technology, and regulation and has a joint appointment at USC Marshall School of Business, is a visiting scholar this fall in the Platform Laboratory at the Digital Data Design Institute (D^3) at Harvard.
The global research center’s mission is to generate a research-based roadmap for businesses and policymakers seeking to build and govern innovative, inclusive and sustainable platform ecosystems, explains Feng Zhu, the MBA Class of 1958 Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School.
Zhu, an expert on platform strategy, digital innovation and transformation, competitive strategy, and business model innovation, leads the Platform Lab within D^3.
“Danny Sokol is the most productive scholar working at the intersection of business, technology and regulation — fields that are rapidly reshaping the global economy,” Zhu says. “His scholarship offers a nuanced understanding of how legal frameworks evolve alongside technological innovation, a perspective that will deeply enrich our research at Harvard’s Platform Lab.”
Collaborative work
At Harvard, Sokol will focus on AI regulation.
“This is fundamental to how law interacts with business and society — this really matters,” he explains. “Are there ways we can really empirically measure, No. 1, the impact of AI regulation, and No. 2, how to create more innovation with less legal risk in a way that still provides appropriate guardrails?”
For example, one of Sokol’s projects will examine venture capital investment before and after AI regulation. Another project focuses on AI regulation in medical devices and how regulation is shaping both leader firms, or early adopters of new technology, and later-adopting firms.
“I will also look at broader issues of digital competition as well as compliance and platform governance,” Sokol says.
In an increasingly digital world, he says, more legal cases involving AI collusion have surfaced.
“We’ve had one involving price-setting behavior at Las Vegas hotels and another price-setting case for residential rentals,” Sokol says, “and the question is, how do we figure out if this is illegal collusion? This is another hot-button issue I’ll be addressing.”
Zhu and Sokol have worked on several research projects in the past. “I look forward to working with him on many more while he’s visiting us,” Zhu says.
Winning paper
For Sokol, the appointment is just the latest CV-burnishing addition in his stellar career.
In May, he was a category winner at the American Antitrust Institute’s 23rd annual Jerry S. Cohen Award for Antitrust Scholarship ceremony — one of numerous honors he’s won from several different practitioner organizations.
Along with his co-author, Sean Sullivan, the Jon and Sarah Fister Chair in Law and Economics at the University of Iowa, Sokol won the best Antitrust Publication on Merger Enforcement for the paper, “The Decline of Coordinated Effects Enforcement and How to Reverse It,” 76 Florida Law Review 265 (2024).
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