Pierre Larouche, "Ordo-liberalism for the digital age - Heike Schweitzer’s 'decentralized coordination order’", ZWeR online, vol. 189, 2026
Résumé en anglais:
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”,1 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.).