Our current research projects on "Administrative planning" (2024-2026), "Algorithmic Law" (2025-2029) and former research actions, such as the European Jean Monnet Network "Sharing Economy and Inequalities across Europe" (2019-2022), are set up by a team of experts (in administrative law, constitutional law, tax law, labor law, economics and sociology) from the University of Valencia and other European Universities, who have been conducting research on the regulation of the digital transformation of many social and economic activities over the last years. Our research aims at analysing, from a multidisciplinary and comparative approach, the most relevant problems raised by the regulation of the so-called digital economy (i.e. peer-to-peer economy, digital platforms issues, collaborative consumption, etc.), and in particular of those systems of production and consumption of goods which use recently developed information technology to enable new kinds of arrangements that, due to transaction costs and information asymmetries, were previously too difficult to implement.

Our starting hypothesis is that most systems of digital economy need to be specifically regulated in order to clarify the law and strike a fair balance between the interests at stake, as those systems present new and substantially different issues that were not foreseen at the time current regulations were enacted. Also, we guess that equality may suffer if public powers do not address this problem throughout public regulation specifically designed for those markets. Our research projects, thus, are trying to determine whether we can prove these hypotheses right in order to propose the proper regulatory frameworks with an empirical knowledge of their social and economic outputs.

After at least ten years of continuous development and a lot of academic studies on the economic basis of the phenomenon, mostly developed in the United States, we can consider that we already have a complete and deep understanding of the fundamental dynamics of the digital economy (as well as some of its most ubiquitous examples: the so-called collaborative economy or the digital platform economy). In Spain and Europe, also, some research has already been carried out (for instance, by members of the Regulation Research Group at the University of Valencia). However, the regulatory challenges that result from these changes are yet to be successfully solved in at least four essential aspects, which are the pivotal areas of analysis of our research projects:

• Neither the EU nor the Spanish legal system have managed, for the time being, to draw up a regulatory framework which is able to reconcile the efficiency gains brought by these new business models with the protection of some basic constitutional social values. That is why we consider essential to study what normative limits the social clause of the Spanish Constitution of 1978 imposes and which obligations for public powers and Public Administration will arise.
• Given the huge impact that big data, automated decision-making and computational power have on digital platform brokerage, these technologies must be closely examined from a legal perspective which assesses their role in enhancing digital processes as well as in generating possible situations of social inequality.
• A third essential dimension is related to the assessment of this impact on social fairness and equality when it affects social groups specially endangered or vulnerable. Gender or social biases, as well as other possible forms of private and public discrimination, are therefore necessary to be studied and analysed from a perspective that takes into account traditional legal tools in a renewed way.
• Finally, an exhaustive evaluation of the impact on social fairness and inequalities of the policies applied to already consolidated sharing economy markets, such as transportation, is still to be made.