Property Right of Data, the Differential Scale, and Cross-border Growth of Platform

The development of the digital economy has a profound impact on business model innovation and brings many new challenges to economic and governance. The response to the claims of the interests of consumers’ personal information, as well as the other issues, such as market mechanism and illegal collection of consumer information, have also attracted extensive attention and discussion. This paper proposes the conception of cross-bound growth of platforms, and analysis the impact mechanism of the property rights of data on the cross-bound growth of platforms and their social welfare by endogenous the price strategy of the platform. The research shows that: (1) Without the constraints of property rights of data, the pricing strategy of the platform will be influenced by the scale difference, and large-scale platform enterprises can achieve cross-bound growth through an internal scope economy. (2) The platform is more inclined to conservative pricing strategies to achieve cross-border growth with a stable user scale when data endowments belong to platform. Otherwise, the platform tends to have aggressive pricing strategies, which are not conducive to cross-bound growth when data property rights belong to users. Compared with the absence of data property rights arrangements, due to the existence of the privacy paradox, data rights confirmation has no substantial impact on the choice of platform pricing strategies in the short term. In the long run, with the gradual standardization of the institutional environment, the abuse of data by platform companies and the use of big data algorithms for discriminatory pricing for profit will be effectively regulated, and the cost of social governance will also decrease. Accordingly, this paper proposes policy suggestions to further improve the market mechanism of data elements and rationally formulate property rights arrangements for data elements.