Regulatory Innovation for Digital Platforms in the Data-Intelligence Era and Its Implications for E-Commerce

The rapid diffusion of digital technologies, including big data, blockchain, and artificial intelligence, unlocks significant potential for marketing innovation in e-commerce while simultaneously raising fresh governance challenges. Digital platforms, as core infrastructures for online transactions and marketing interactions, have therefore come under increasing regulatory scrutiny amid tensions between technological progress and social stability. This study compiles a comprehensive Chinese Digital Platform Policy dataset consisting of national-level policy documents issued from 2000 through July 2025. We introduce a time-dimension topic clustering approach using density-based LDA algorithm to construct a policy corpus with reduced thematic overlap and develop a document-level policy intensity index by quantifying and aggregating the salience of domain-specific terms across documents. Validation exercises confirm the intensity measure strongly correlates with e-commerce transaction value and with digital innovation, with statistically significant lags consistent with policy implementation and firm adaptation. Beyond offering an empirically grounded metric, our analysis traces the dynamic co-evolution of regulation and technology adoption and identify composition effects—the joint influences of enabling and disciplining policy elements—on market outcomes. We argue that such effects also reconfigure the mix of marketing innovations. Collectively, the corpus and measurement framework provide a foundation for analyzing how regulatory innovation shapes the trajectory of marketing innovation and e-commerce development.