Abstract This contribution celebrates the achievements and salutes the memory of a most friendly and inspiring colleague, Heike Schweitzer, whom we all dearly miss. Before her untimely passing, Heike had embarked on a journey to recast the ordo-liberal tradition, of which she was a rightful heir, in the context of the digital age. The central element in that endeavour had been her 2020 article “Vertragsfreiheit, Marktregulierung, Marktverfassung: Privatrecht als dezentrale Koordinationsordnung”, upon which this contribution will build. In this contribution, I review the main lines in Schweitzer’s analysis (I.), with focus on an undertheorized element, namely the role of market failure (II.). This leads me to present a matrix of market theories (III.) to assist in dealing with a central challenge identified by Schweitzer, namely the significance and impact of matchmaking by platforms and agentic AI (IV.). With the help of the matrix, I point to two shortcomings in the emerging literature on that issue, relating to distributional and dynamic effects of markets (V.), before adding to Schweitzer’s analysis in conclusion (VI.).
Pierre Larouche (Mon,) studied this question.