Antitrust Platform Regulation and Entrepreneurship: Evidence from China

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Rong, Ke; Sokol, Daniel; Zhou, Di; Zhu, Feng
• 署名单位: Tsinghua University; University of Southern California; Tongji University; Harvard University
• 刊物名称: MANAGEMENT SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0025-1909
• DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.2024.04397
• 发表日期: 2026
• 关键词: platform; ANTITRUST; regulation; entrepreneurship; venture capital

摘要

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.