Economics by design: sequencing expertise in the Digital Markets Act

The Digital Markets Act (DMA) offers a revealing case through which to examine the evolving role of economic expertise in EU regulatory governance. This article analyses how economics is selectively mobilised, constrained, and reintroduced across the DMA’s regulatory lifecycle. While economic analysis played an important role in the pre-legislative diagnosis of digital market failures, the enacted Regulation deliberately limits effects-based reasoning through bright-line obligations that prioritise administrability, speed, and legal certainty. Drawing on early implementation practice, this paper shows that enforcement has so far relied primarily on legal compliance assessments, with economic reasoning playing a selective and institutionally bounded role, most visibly upstream and at the margins of decision-making. This article argues that the evaluation stage, institutionalised in Article 53 DMA and embedded in the EU Better Regulation Framework, represents the main channel for the re-entry of economics. Yet this channel remains tightly structured around indicators and auditable proxies. The paper therefore advances a normative claim: for the DMA to remain adaptive, institutional space must be preserved for a more substantive economic assessment of underlying trade-offs – particularly those involving innovation and investment – beyond indicator based evaluation alone.