Nicolas Petit
Nicolas Petit is Professor of Competition Law and Head of the Law Department at the European University Institute (EUI). His research in recent years has focused on EU and US competition law, competition and innovation, law and economics, and law in a context of technological change. Petit uses mixed approaches, combining law and economics with doctrinal and empirical legal methods. His work covers a range of topics, including the application of economic analysis to competition law, the intersection between competition law and intellectual property, and the regulation of digital markets. He is known for his contributions to the development of the "more economic approach" to competition law and policy, which emphasises the use of economics and empirical evidence in antitrust analysis.
Petit has written several academic books, including Big Tech and the Digital Economy: The Moligopoly Scenario, EU Competition Law and Economics, and Droit européen de la concurrence.
He has published his scholarly research in top journals including the Antitrust Law Journal, European Law Review, Review of Industrial Organization, Journal of Evolutionary Economics, Common Market Law Review, Columbia Journal of European Law and Berkeley Journal of Law & Technology. SSRN ranks Petit at number 23 among its top 3,000 law authors. Petit is also co-author of The Constitution of Innovation (with Nobel laureate Bengt Holmström and Luis Garicano), a work featured in the Financial Times, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal. He contributes opinion pieces to mainstream news outlets.
Petit previously served as a Full Professor at the University of Liège, from which he also holds a PhD. In the past, he has worked as an assessor with the Belgian competition authority and in private practice for a prominent US law firm based in Brussels. He was also a Visiting Researcher at Harvard Law School in 2005, and served on the European Commission High Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence from 2017 to 2020. He was a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution (Stanford University) in 2018, and has been a Visiting Professor at the College of Europe since 2019. In 2022, he co-founded the Dynamic Competition Initiative (DCI) with the University of California, Berkeley. In 2025, Petit was a Visiting Professor at George Mason University.
