高度联通社会中的资源重组与服务业增长

Resource Reorganization and the Growth of the Service Industry in an Interconnected Society

本文的分析表明,现代技术特别是网络技术的发展,正在改变服务业的基本性质,引起了广泛的资源重组与聚合,对传统服务经济理论提出根本挑战,如服务业生产率低的假设不再成立,新古典价格理论很难解释服务价格形成,人们的消费理性发生了变化。同时,与互联网络相关的经济学问题,如互联网经济学、平台经济学、信息产品定价等问题也亟待研究。未来需要理论层面的分析、权衡和选择,如互联网带来的"隐私保护与数据利用效率"两难选择和"精神与心理消费"的复杂性等问题,迫切需要理论研究和创新。

Summary： The rapid growth of the internet has facilitated the transformation of services and products and boosted the development of new service industries. As a result, increased demand to meet the mental and psychological needs growing out of feelings and experiences are becoming an important part of service consumption. Within a short period, new services, represented by the internet-based ＂happy consumption＂, are capturing a dominant share of the market, and they are strong enough to reshape the traditional service industry. These new internet-based services are clearly characterized by scale economies, scope economies and the long-tail effect. As information dissemination speeds up and all strata of society are vastly interconnected in the internet era, transaction and resource reorganization costs are decreasing. These are leading to comprehensive resource reorganization and aggregation. As the focal point of competition shifts to grabbing consumers＇ attention, new business models featuring aggregated demand and resources are emerging. A group of large enterprises represented by digital platforms compiles market resources, the application of feedback systems and big data collects signals of service quality, the expansion of the internet industry chain merges production resources and the formation of a sharing economy aggregates massive fragmented resources. Facing these changes, traditional service economy theory is confronted with at least three challenges. First, the verdict of low productivity in the service industry does not hold. The productivity of the service industry is increasing dramatically as the internet transforms the provision of services. Second, the price formation mechanism is changing. The fixed cost of information services is generally high, whereas the marginal cost is close to zero, so the ＂average cost＂ and ＂marginal cost＂ can hardly be measured. The gross demand is inestimable, price fluctuations are very normal given that the market updates promptly and the process approaching equilibrium is unobservable. Neoclassical price theory is no longer practical to illustrate the price formation of information services. Third, as the interconnected society provides a wealth of information, the way people collect market signals is changing, and the choices people make based on these signals is correspondingly being altered. This leads to the transformation of ＂rationality＂. At the same time, research focused on internet economics is springing up, and internet economics is becoming an independent discipline. Internet economics covers a variety of content, ranging from access pricing, the construction and profit model, competition strategy and government regulation to competition, games and cooperation between different types of networks. The platform economy is a hot issue because it analyzes the network effect of the platforms, asymmetrical costs, monopolies, competition, innovation, externalities and government administration. The pricing of information products is turning into a specific research field consisting of information economics and internet economics. Many researchers in the internet era are incorporating new phenomena into the framework of their economic analyses and conducting research on how to design a more efficient market system, in addition to optimizing market-based resource allocation in the digital environment. Game theory is probably the most feasible way to analyze internet-based economic issues. In sum, the internet and big data call for new requirements in theoretical innovation as new puzzlements and questions in economic activities, social order and people＇s lives are raised. The balance between privacy protection and data usage in internet-based services is a typical illustration. It is the government＇s responsibility to make prudent judgments on whether a phenomenon is reasonable or overheated. Hence, new challenges and questions require analysis, tradeoff and making choices at the theoretical level. New theories can help to set the criteria for policymaking, interpret the significance of policies, manage the tradeoff between various options, clarify public benefits and predict the future.