Algorithmic Accountability and Digital Market Power: A Systematic Review of AI Regulation in the Digital Economy

AI is becoming more and more involved in decision-making processes in banking, healthcare, recruitment, education, online platforms and so on, but its logic is often not transparent, and the economic might lies in the platform companies – frameworks of accountability and competition are not built for that, and current law is not fully equipped to handle that. This paper is a systematic review of the literature, including socio-legal, regulatory and law-and-economics documents, as well as primary legal documents, identified in Scopus, Web of Science, HeinOnline, EconLit, RePEc, SSRN, EUR-Lex, Westlaw and Lexis+ from January 2016 to August 2026, of which 1,284 documents were identified, 908 screened, 217 assessed for full-text and 96 included. It concludes that the transparency obligations of the EU AI Act are not on their own sufficient to create accountability; that competition law is still structurally ill-suited to zero-price data-driven platform markets despite the turn in the Digital Markets Act; and that it is enforcement capacity, not doctrine, which is the binding constraint for the Brussels Effect beyond Europe, in particular in India and Malaysia. The review outlines the current state of knowledge that will support an upcoming research programme of a doctrinal, empirical and computational nature, and creates a comparative research agenda between the EU, India and Malaysia for scientists and policy makers.