Antitrust Platform Regulation and Entrepreneurship: Evidence from China

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. This paper was accepted by D. J. Wu, information systems. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2024.04397 .