On Feb. 13, 2026, delivery workers put up Spring Festival couplets at a local service station in Jimo District, Qingdao City, Shandong Province. Photo: IC PHOTO

In today’s China, the platform economy has become a powerful engine turbocharging economic and social development.

Transcending traditional theoretical frameworks

Wang Yongjin, a professor from the School of Economics at Nankai University, noted that digital technologies are enabling comprehensive transformations within traditional industries, fostering deep interconnections among people, machines, and things. As a result, many conventional products are evolving into information carriers, giving rise to a new form known as “platformized products.” Two major trends have followed: the platformization of products and the service-oriented transformation of manufacturing. This rich landscape of practice provides a solid foundation for theoretical innovation, pushing research beyond the traditional dichotomy between markets and firms and endowing platform categories and business models with new contemporary meaning.

During the 14th Five-Year Plan period (2021–25), research achieved systematic advances on key issues such as the standardized and healthy development of the platform economy, anti-monopoly regulation, and the role of platforms in empowering the real economy.

Li Sanxi, a professor from the School of Economics at Renmin University of China, outlined the field’s major advances. In the domain of anti-monopoly regulation, scholars have moved beyond the traditional structuralist paradigm and established a more inclusive “behavioralist” regulatory principle. This approach shifts regulatory attention from the existence of a dominant market position to whether platforms abuse that position, laying the groundwork for a more balanced and prudent regulatory framework.

In identifying anti-competitive behavior, Li explained, analytical frameworks have been reconstructed on the basis of two-sided market theory. Researchers have reassessed the welfare effects of practices such as low-price subsidies, noting that under cross-network externalities, asymmetric pricing may in some cases be efficiency-enhancing.

Meanwhile, refined theoretical analyses have examined new forms of monopolistic behavior such as the practice of forcing merchants to choose one of two platforms. These studies, Li added, propose new analytical paradigms that distinguish between “coercive exclusion” and “efficiency-driven exclusion.” At the same time, scholars have begun developing forward-looking analytical frameworks for data and algorithms, offering deeper interpretations of emerging competition issues such as data monopolies and algorithmic collusion.

Confronting new theoretical challenges

As the platform economy expands from the consumer internet to the industrial internet and into the broader domain of technological innovation, a series of deeper challenges has come into view. Li Xianjun, an associate research fellow from the Institute of Industrial Economics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, observed in his long-term research that factors such as plateauing growth, diminishing user dividends, intensifying involution, regulatory lag, challenges in data and algorithm governance, insufficient protection of labor rights, and barriers to expansion in vertical sectors are increasingly constraining the platform economy’s further development.

Research on the platform economy therefore urgently requires deeper interdisciplinary integration across economics and other fields. Yet much existing work remains confined within single disciplinary perspectives, lacking systematic explanations for the co-evolution of technology, institutions, and organizational structures. This theoretical lag is particularly evident in the frontier practices of platform governance.

Li Sanxi further observed that in balancing platform self-governance and external regulation, theoretical development still trails behind practical exploration. Platforms have already established effective internal governance through forms of private order such as algorithmic rules and credit rating systems. However, academia has yet to provide systematic guidance on how to define the boundaries between government oversight and platform autonomy. In practice, this gap produces a dilemma: Excessive regulation may stifle innovation, while excessive leniency can allow market disorder to spread. On core issues such as the legal validity of platform rules and the legitimate scope of platform disciplinary authority, theoretical input remains insufficient.

Building China’s independent knowledge system

Drawing on China’s rich governance experience, Wang argues that externality theory offers particularly strong potential for theoretical breakthroughs. Unlike the relatively simple, one-directional externalities typical of the industrial era, externalities in the platform economy are more complex, often hidden, multidirectional, and multidimensional.

Platforms simultaneously generate significant positive and negative externalities. On the one hand, Wang noted, network effects represent a classic form of positive externality, yet the added value they create is often unevenly distributed. Platforms may capture most of the value generated by user aggregation, while merchants and consumers struggle to share in these gains equitably. On the other hand, the extensive connectivity of platforms also amplifies negative externalities, allowing risks to spread more quickly and enabling harmful information to diffuse more widely. Dynamic explorations in areas such as platform profit-sharing mechanisms, the clarification of platform responsibilities, and the prevention of negative externalities provide uniquely fertile ground for further theoretical innovation.

China boasts the world’s largest, most diverse, and most dynamic platform economy ecosystem. Academia should therefore be both bold and creative in developing new theories grounded in local practice and responsive to the questions of our time, advancing innovation in both research paradigms and disciplinary foundations, Wang suggested.