Annual Review of Economics · 2026 · Joshua S. Gans
Abstract
This article surveys the relevant existing literature that can help researchers and policymakers understand the drivers of competition in markets that provide artificial intelligence (AI) products. The focus is on three broad markets: training data, input data, and AI predictions. A recurring theme is that the mobility of data across firm boundaries, including the operation of data markets, is central to the emergence and persistence of market power, but its force depends on interacting bottlenecks such as compute, attention scarcity, platform design, and model openness.