Payal Malik is a public policy economist, her areas of expertise are competition law and policy, digital markets, antitrust litigation, technology policy, and economic regulation of network industries. She has been an Economic Adviser and Head of the Economics Division at the Competition Commission of India for ten years between 2012-2023, where she played a key role in advising the Commission on the economics of competition law across an expansive range of markets and led interfaces between the CCI, sector regulators, government, industry and the international competition community.
Notably, she was the Convener of the Working Group on New Age Economy and Bigdata constituted by the Ministry of Corporate Affairs, Government of India (GoI), for the competition law review committee (CLRC). She was also nominated as a member of the task force of the GoI formulating the ecommerce policy of India and member of a sub group of the Committee on Digital Competition law (CDCL), devising an ex-ante regulatory mechanism for digital markets through a separate legislation.
She led several Market Studies of the Commission including e-commerce, pharmaceutical, telecommunications, institutional investment and competition and film industry and interfaced with pharma, telecom and coal ministries for developing competition compliant policies and legislations guided by the Commission’s Market Studies.
Formerly, she has been a visiting Senior Research Fellow LIRNEasia and Senior Consultant, NCAER, Delhi. Her professional collaborations have been with OECD, Orbicom, IDEI, University of Toulouse, Technical University, Delft, Netherlands, University of Québec at Montreal, CEPR, JRC, European Commission, IPTS Seville, ICEGEC, Hungary, Department of Information Technology, TRAI, Ministry of Power, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Planning Commission of India, CSO, India, WSP-SA, World Bank and AFD, Paris. She has several years of research and economic consulting experience in network Industries such as power and telecommunication, ICTs, Innovation systems, and Infrastructure. She was on the team that drafted the Electricity Act of India ushering competition into the sector.
She has published in peer reviewed international and Indian journals in the area of competition law and policy. She is a regular columnist and writes op-eds in the field of regulation and competition for reputed business and daily newspapers.
