Technological breakthroughs often trigger market volatility, complicating capital allocation for investors. While prior work suggests that regulatory interventions chill innovation and venture activity, in some settings regulation might instead stabilize markets following technological shocks. We examine this stabilization dynamic through two concurrent shocks to China's entrepreneurial finance ecosystem: the rise of Generative AI and the subsequent implementation of AI regulation. Our findings reveal a counter-intuitive result: rather than constraining the market, AI regulation moderated the negative impact of the generative AI shock on venture capital investment. This suggests that in high-uncertainty environments, proactive regulation may act as a market-enabling force rather than a barrier.

Digital technologies act as general-purpose technologies that drive the development of the digital economy, and digital technology diffusion (DTD) exerts broad influences on firms' digitally enabled innovation. Yet little is known about how DTD reshapes firms' labor demand within regional innovation ecosystems. Using panel data on 286 Chinese city-level regional innovation ecosystems from 2012 to 2021, we examine how within-ecosystem DTD reshapes firms' labor demand structures. The results show that higher levels of DTD significantly increase occupational diversity, with firms' innovation capabilities serving as an important mechanism. This effect varies with the ecosystem's innovation resource endowment: it is stronger in ecosystems with more abundant industrial resources but weaker in those with richer human resources. We further find that the positive impact of DTD emerges mainly in the advanced stage of digital economy development. Spatial analyses reveal that positive spillover effects of DTD also arise only in this advanced stage, operating through both geographic proximity and similarity in digital economy development levels. By linking DTD to structural changes in labor demand, this study advances research on digital innovation and regional innovation ecosystems while extending dynamic capabilities theory to the ecosystem level. The findings also highlight the importance for firms of reconfiguring workforce strategies in response to DTD-induced occupational diversification.

The rise of platform-based multinational corporations (PMNCs) driven by the digital economy has increasingly provided new implications for international business (IB) theories. IB scholars have begun to explore alternative research streams that provide a fertile ground for studying PMNCs. Through in-depth investigations on the definition, categorization, and distinctive characteristics of PMNCs, we develop a research framework to study PMNCs and shed light on IB theories. We propose different types of PMNCs that influence international businesses from both the consumption side and production side of global value chains, including transaction PMNCs and industry PMNCs. We also provide a research agenda that guides future studies on PMNCs, aiming to make insightful contributions to IB literature and provide practical implications for IB managers and policymakers.

Many jurisdictions have launched antitrust enforcement and brought in regulation of large tech platforms. The swift and strict implementation of China's Anti-Monopoly Guidelines for the Platform Economy (Platform Guidelines) provides a quasi-natural experiment to evaluate the impact of antitrust regulation on platform competition. We adopt a difference-in-differences approach to empirically explore the impact of China's Platform Guidelines on the number of investments and the entry of startups in platform markets. The results show that the Platform Guidelines did not increase entrepreneurship in these affected markets. Rather, entrepreneurship weakened in these markets, with less venture capital investment flowing into them and fewer startups entering these markets. Our study suggests that governments should consider more carefully the potential unintended consequences of antitrust platform regulation.

The prevalence of platform-based multinational corporations (PMNCs) has been increasing, and these businesses are encountering several growing challenges. These challenges include the dynamics and diversification of the global Regulatory context (R), the evolution of platform Ecosystems as innovative organization forms (E), the emergence of Artificial intelligence technologies as a new capability (A), and the introduction of Data as a novel resource (D). A ‘READ’ framework is proposed to guide the research of PMNCs based on four dimensions. This framework aims to enhance comprehension of the challenges faced by PMNCs within the global context and to offer direction for future research endeavors.

With the rapid advancement of mobile internet, UGC video platforms have become integral to the daily lives of young generations. For content creators on these platforms, sharing videos sponsored by corporations is the primary method to monetize their work. This research delves into the impact of video content sponsorship and sponsorship disclosure on consumer engagement by analyzing nearly 30,000 videos on the Bilibili platform. The results indicate that video sponsorships have a significantly negative impact on consumer engagement. However, comprehensive disclosure of sponsorship beforehand can improve consumer engagement. Additionally, our study demonstrates that followers of top-tier content creators are more sensitive to video sponsorships. This paper presents a critical empirical investigation of the sponsorship issue within the context of UGC platforms, making valuable contributions to the theories of advertisements' externalities in two-sided markets and information asymmetry.

数字经济时代,平台企业在利用数据创造价值的同时,也存在数据滥用的问题.本文构建了涵盖平台企业、用户和政府在内的三方演化博弈模型,探究了平台企业数据滥用行为的治理机制,并通过MATLAB进行数值模拟.结果表明:(1)平台企业滥用用户数据获得的额外规模报酬的增大对平台企业数据滥用行为的治理具有双重影响;(2)用户举报公正度对平台企业数据滥用行为的治理具有正向促进作用;(3)政府的奖惩机制对平台企业和用户具有相反的作用机理.本文对数据要素市场和平台治理研究有较好的理论贡献,并为平台企业数据滥用行为的治理提供实践参考,有助于我国数据要素市场体系的设计与监管.

Much of the success in the sharing economy surrounds digital platforms and other large-scale mediating technologies, especially matching technology. Our study analyzes how renters' sensitivity affects the sharing platforms' matching strategy in both B2C and C2C scenarios and investigates how this affects other parties, such as producers, consumers, and social welfare. We construct game-theoretic models and show that in the C2C scenario when the matching level is exogenous and renters' sensitivity is low, the platform profit and social welfare have an inverted U-shape relationship with the matching level. Notably, the platform-optimal matching level is less than the social-optimal level. And when renters' sensitivity is high, improving matching can achieve a Pareto improvement for the platform, the producer, the consumers, and the whole society due to the spillover effect. However, when the matching level is endogenous, the encouraging effect of renters' sensitivity on encouraging the platform to improve matching begins to emerge. And we show that renters' sensitivity can achieve a "win-win-win" situation for consumers, ?rms, and the social planner when it is too low or too high. Similarly, in the B2C scenario, the platform profit and social welfare have an inverted U-shape relationship with the matching level. However, we show a counter-intuitive result that the rental price increases as marginal product cost decreases, due to the renter effect. We believe that the renter effect is widely applied in sharing situations where the platform charge higher for lower-cost products, such as sharing power bank. Our study provides practical implications for sharing business operations and governments.

Firms providing virtual platforms that connect buyers with sellers of goods and services are increasingly venturing abroad, sometimes from or near inception. However, these platform multinational companies (PMNCs) seem to struggle more against local competitors in foreign markets compared to more traditional MNCs when it comes to capturing market share and generating profits. In this study, we explore the underlying causes of these patterns. We first flesh out several stylized facts from a longitudinal case study of the mobile phone industry in China, and then we use these facts as input for formal economic modelling and simulations to derive generalized propositions. We find that informal institutional distance (IID) at the macro business system and micro product market levels poses challenges to all MNCs. Yet, whereas traditional MNCs can overcome IID by leveraging their product quality advantage, PMNCs are usually unable to do so and are, thus, more likely to underperform. We explicate that this pattern is likely underpinned by network effects that exacerbate the role of IID for the foreign PMNC. We discuss implications of these results for theory of the PMNC, particularly focusing on the need for research examining how this unique form of MNC can overcome internationalization challenges associated with IID.

Real social information is believed to cause a trust–privacy paradox in e‐commerce platforms, with the degree of information disclosure affecting platform performance. In this study, we split the mixed influence into the direct trust mechanism and the indirect privacy mechanism, studying each in the context of partial and full social information disclosure, respectively. Using unique data from an 80‐day large‐scale online experiment conducted in an e‐commerce platform in China, we show that a partial social information disclosure could reduce the conversion rate, while a full social information disclosure could promote both the conversion and sales rates of the e‐commerce platform through a trust mechanism. Moreover, social information disclosure would reduce the sales rate and promote the conversion rate through a privacy mechanism. However, even though the degree of privacy could enhance the privacy mechanism, this mechanism is still much weaker than a trust mechanism. Overall, social information could play a positive role in e‐commerce platforms if it is fully disclosed. This study encourages cooperation between social media platforms and e‐commerce platforms by introducing a real social relationship into the online trading market.

数据的确权对数据要素市场的发展至关重要.数据在不同场景下所衍生出的权利具有复杂性和差异性,很难使用一个统一的标准进行所有数据权利的确权.本文首次提出通过构建数据要素市场的分级授权机制来解决数据确权问题.通过构建经济学模型,本文发现政府可以通过设计有效的数据要素市场分级授权机制来促使平台企业自发地基于市场规则遵循数据分级授权的要求,一个有效的数据要素市场分级授权机制可有以下作用:(1)可以在遵守最小必要原则的同时,提升愿意授权数据的用户数和平台企业获得的数据总量;(2)可以提升用户福利,并增加用户福利份额;(3)可以在数据要素规模报酬递增水平增强时,更好地提升用户福利及用户福利份额;(4)可以通过制定合理的数据要素授权标准提升用户福利和用户福利份额.本文建议政府制定有效的数据要素市场分级授权指导文件,在促进数据要素市场健康发展的同时,提升数据要素市场的普惠性,从而实现数据要素市场的"共同富裕".

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) brings opportunities for the participating countries to improve their institutional environment. Based on the Global Terrorism Database, this paper constructs a panel data covering 152 countries from 2004 to 2018, and analyzes the policy effects of the BRI on reducing terrorist activities using the Generalized Difference-in-Differences model. The main findings include: firstly, the BRI can supplement the local political institution directly, and not only reduces the number of terrorist attacks, but also reduces the casualty of such attacks. Secondly, the policy effect of the BRI can be achieved through the improvement of the economic institutions, such as trade, FDI, digital infrastructure and economic growth. Finally, the policy effect of the BRI is weakened in the countries having relatively poorer social institutions, such as when the countries are at civil wars. This paper contributes to the research on the institutional theory and country specific advantage theory, and provides practical guidance for firms doing international business in the BRI participating countries with weak institutions.

本文对数字经济时代下中国计算产业生态中技术、平台和应用层级存在的问题进行深入探索分析,提出面对强大的以美国为主导的第一计算产业生态时,需要坚定不移地构建一个以中国为主导的、关键技术自主可控的、多元开放国际化并与第一生态兼容的计算产业第二创新生态.研究认为,在技术生态层面应坚持核心技术的自主可控,坚持技术生态的开放共赢;在平台生态层面应推进生产领域的万物互联,强化消费领域的移动互联,突破"产用峡谷";在应用生态层面应加强平台反垄断,促进中小企业创新,推进生态出海.