Challenges and Method Improvement of Relevant Market Definition in Digital Economy
Abstract：The deep integration and wide application of information and communication technology and digital data technologypromotes the rapid development of digital economy，cultivates various new industries and new models，and brings earth- shaking changes to the market competition mode，industrial organization structure and the specific business behavior of operators.Under the background of digital economy，the platform- centered business model leads to the enhanced competition， and the more complicated cross-market competition and integration and the emergence of asymmetric pricing structure in bilateral and multilateral market，which brings many challenges to the current market definition method based on the commodity function and price in the unilateral market. The limitation of the existing related market definition is highlighted. In order to respond to the related market definition problems in the digital economy，it is suggested to return to the substitution analysis of user demand. While the price variable is gradually weakening，user attention，data and commodity quality constitute the important variables to be investigated in the relevant market definition.Based on this，it is necessary to pay attention to the accurate analysis of the relevant market definition in the case in combination with the specific scenarios of user demand substitution.Specifically，with the market competition mode in the field of digital economy gradually changing from traditional price competition to user attention competition and data competition，the accurate grasp and continuous competition of user demand have largely determined the competitive advantage and maintenance of operators in relevant markets.Therefore，in order to gain competitive advantage in the attention competition，operators must pay close attention to the user's needs，and constantly optimize and upgrade the quality of goods，and add commodity functions. So，the definition of relevant market should consider the user's diversion scope and data transfer cost based on the user's demand substitution，so as to reflectthe impact of personalized，customized and refined characteristicson the application of the anti- trust law in the digital economy，and highlights the increase of the weight of user preferences in the demand substitution analysis.
Key words：digital economy；anti-trust law；relevant market definition；demand substitution；non-price factors