Mateusz Grochowski receives project grant from Villa Vigoni

June 15, 2023

Mateusz Grochowski, research fellow at the Institute, has been awarded funding from the Villa Vigoni – German-Italian Centre for European Dialogue for an international project studying private regulation in platform economies. The research project, undertaken in partnership with scholars from Europe and the USA, focuses in particular on rules adopted by digital platforms in the form of general terms and conditions.

Every day, millions of people use intermediary online services such as digital marketplaces, app stores, or social media platforms. “To the extent that these platforms regulate issues relating to, for instance, human rights law and contract law, they assume a role traditionally reserved to the state,” observes Grochowski.

The research and contributions of the participating researchers will be discussed and brought to conclusion at a conference to be held on 11-14 December 2023 at the Italian headquarters of Villa Vigoni on Lake Como. The conference, titled “Enforcing Private Regulation in the Platform Economy”, is being organized together with Federica Casarosa from the European University Institute in Florence. The papers presented at the conference will be compiled in an edited volume that will be published in 2014 by Mohr Siebeck.

Villa Vigoni is a binational association sponsored by the Federal Republic of Germany and the Republic of Italy. Among its tasks, the association aims to intensify and broaden academic cooperation between the two countries. The conference is being funded in the context of the program “German-Italian Cooperation in the Field of Humanities and Social Sciences”, a project cooperatively led and sponsored by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG).