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Ellen van ‘t Klooster
Ellen van ’t Klooster is a researcher at SEO Amsterdam Economics, in the Competition, Aviation and Innovation cluster. She is passionate about the impact of information technology on competition and consumer welfare.
At SEO, Ellen focuses on competition-related issues. She has conducted a vignette analysis on consumer behavior and studied potential abuse of market power by platforms. Before joining SEO, Ellen was a PhD at Utrecht University. She also previously worked at SEO and has experience in consultancy.
During her PhD research, Ellen focused on the market power of information technology firms and digital platforms, such as Alphabet and Meta. Using firm-level data, she examined the impact of a large platform on local businesses in the Netherlands. Her findings showed that businesses that did not join the platform could experience significant customer loss after entry of the platform. In addition, she studied broader trends in the tech sector. By distinguishing between tech and non-tech firms in a large company database, she was able to analyze a wide group of technology companies and found that these firms, on average, achieved substantially higher profit margins. This suggests that market power in the tech industry is not limited to isolated cases, but also stems from structural factors such as economies of scale, network effects, and access to large volumes of user data.
Ellen applies techniques including web scraping, Natural Language Processing (NLP), data analysis, and econometrics. In addition to her quantitative expertise, she has experience with qualitative methods such as interviews and focus groups. She enjoys translating her findings into practical insights and policy recommendations. She is driven by applied research, without losing sight of broader economic and societal developments.
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