Research on the Development Dilemma of China's Platform Economy

based on Data Mining Technology

Zhili Dai and Yingge Du

School of Economics and Management, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beixiaguan, Beijing, China

Keywords: Data Mining, Platform Economy, Platform Monopoly, Platform Supervision.

Abstract: The rapid development of the Internet has given birth to a new economic form based on the platform, and the

platform economy has gradually become a new engine for development. The platform economy is of great

significance in promoting economic development and providing employment opportunities. However, there

are still many problems in the development process, which brings many challenges to the original government

governance measures. This paper crawls the abstracts and keywords of papers related to platform economic

development on CNKI as a data source and uses the TF-IDF algorithm to mine the important features of the

obtained texts, and put forward targeted countermeasures to achieve the benign development of the platform

economy.

1 INTRODUCTION

Contemporary society has entered the Internet era.

The rapid development of the Internet is changing the

way people work, live, and think. The development

of the Internet has promoted technological

innovation, and a large number of platform

companies based on the Internet, big data, and mobile

technologies have risen rapidly. In recent years, the

Internet platform economy has shown a booming

development around the world. The platform

economy is a digital economy in which the Internet

platform organizes production factors to produce

products and services. It covers many digital

activities in business, politics, and social interaction

(Kenney, Zysman, 2016).

The platform economy is regarded as one of the

three major events of the "digital revolution". China

has a vast Internet market, and the number of netizens

ranks first in the world, which provides fertile soil for

the development of the platform economy. At the

same time, China's rapid development in artificial

intelligence, big data, and other technological fields

has also played an important role in the rapid

development of the platform economy effect.

The platform economy involves all walks of life.

While China's platform economy is developing

vigorously, it also faces many problems, not only the

problems of the platform economy itself but also the

problems involving industries and employees.

Therefore, based on data mining technology, this

paper crawls the abstracts and keywords of CNKI

papers related to platform economic development and

uses the TF-IDF algorithm to extract important

features in the obtained texts. Therefore, it analyses

and excavates the main problems of the current

development of China's platform economy, and

proposes corresponding solutions to the problems, to

promote the sustainable development of the platform

economy.

2 DATA ANALYSIS

At this stage, Python and its crawler technology are

widely used on the Internet. Compared with C++ and

Java languages, Python language syntax is simpler

and the operation process is relatively convenient.

Crawling data with Python-based crawlers is

relatively efficient. In addition, Python can provide a

more practical framework for program writing, and

provide a guarantee for crawlers to quickly obtain

data information on web pages. It can quickly

complete the writing of various program tasks in a

relatively short period, which is beneficial to data

mining and data processing. Python technology can

be widely used in scientific research, web security,

446

Dai, Z. and Du, Y.

Research on the Development Dilemma of China’s Platform Economy based on Data Mining Technology.

DOI: 10.5220/0011184200003440

In Proceedings of the International Conference on Big Data Economy and Digital Management (BDEDM 2022), pages 446-451

ISBN: 978-989-758-593-7

product development public opinion monitoring, and

other fields.

2.1 Data Collection

The data used in this article comes from the abstracts

and keywords of papers on the development of

platform economy in CNKI. CNKI has strong

authority in the domestic academic circle, and the

abstracts and keywords can help us quickly

understand the main content of the article. The

specific steps of data collection in this paper are as

follows:

Write a crawler program using the Python

programming language. By analysing the HTML

grammatical structure of the target website, with the

help of the request package in Python, the obtained

target text information is located using XPath. Enter

"Platform Economic Development" on the CNKI

platform for retrieval, carry out data collection for the

retrieved content, crawl all the content that meets the

retrieval conditions, and save it into a text file. and

provide important support for the development of the

platform economy.

Import the crawled text data into Excel. Since the

conditions for inserting the "$" delimiter between

different attribute data are set during the crawling

process, after importing, you can successfully store

different types of data into different columns through

the column-by-column function that comes with

Excel to obtain valid data.

Preliminary verification and correction of the

data. Check whether the data items and relevant data

correspond to each other through the webpage. After

the check is completed, the data collection is

completed.

2.2 Data Cleaning

After the completion of the data collection, this

research collected a total of 302 articles about

"platform economic development", and the character

attributes include the paper title, abstract, and

keywords. Preliminary data preprocessing is

performed on the data set according to the collected

data, and the processed data are mainly duplicate

data, missing data, and wrong data, to achieve a better

data utilization effect.

2.3 Data Mining

This paper mainly uses the keywords of the paper to

discriminate and separate the keywords with the help

of Excel's automatic sorting tool. TF-IDF is a

common feature extraction method, which is

characterized by being simple and fast, and the results

are more in line with the actual situation. This paper

uses the TF-IDF algorithm in the Python Chinese

word segmentation package ‘jieba’ to obtain the

keywords of the text. Run the program in python to

obtain the word frequency, inverse document

frequency, and TF-IDF value of the content obtained

afterword segmentation. The formulas involved in

this program are shown in formulas (1) and (2):

(1)

(2)

In the program, first count the total word

frequency, then calculate the TF and IDF values of

each word and finally calculate the TF-IDF value of

each word, which is obtained by multiplying the TF

value by the IDF value. Among them, we first sorted

the word frequency counted by the Python script by

sorting, transposing, and descending order in Excel,

and obtained the order of each word according to the

number of occurrences (due to a large number of

words, only part of the display): The word frequency

sorting is as follows Table 1 shows:

Table 1: Word frequency order.

Term Frequency Term Frequency

Platform

economy

221 … …

Platform

enterprise

40 Antitrust

laws

Internet

platform

24 Network

effect

Anti-

monopoly

20 Monopolistic

ehavio

Government

11 Prudential

regulation

… … Worker

protection

Finally, arrange and output according to the TF-

IDF value of each word from large to small, and the

obtained results are shown in Table 2 (due to the

excessive amount of actual output, only part is shown

here):

Table 2: TF-IDF value of the word.

Term TF-IDF Term TF-IDF

Platform

economy

0.014901366 … …

Platform

enterprise

0.014810958

Antitrust

laws

0.006786429

Internet

platform

0.013226495

Network

effect

0.004335937

Anti-

monopoly

0.011794409

Monopoli--

stic

ehavio

0.003630275

Term Frequency （TF） =

the number of times a word appears in the article

the total number of words in the article

Inverse document frequency



IDF



=log

total number of documents in corpus

number of documents containing the word + 1



Research on the Development Dilemma of China’s Platform Economy based on Data Mining Technology

447

Government 0.00785033

Prudential

regulation

0.003630275

… …

Worker

protection

0.003630275

Because scholars have different definitions of

nouns, the words are scattered. After sorting out, it

can be found that terms related to platform monopoly,

platform supervision, employment protection, and

other aspects appear more frequently. Among them,

“monopoly” appeared 66 times, “supervision”

appeared 22 times, and “labor protection” related

terms appeared 10 times. Therefore, these issues are

also issues of general concern in the current academic

circles. Next, I will elaborate on these three issues.

3 PLATFORM ECONOMY

DEVELOPMENT DILEMMA

3.1 Problem of Protecting the Rights of

Employees

The platform economy has provided more

employment opportunities and absorbed a large

number of flexible employment populations. The

"China Sharing Economy Development Report

(2021)" released by the State Information Center

shows that in 2020, the transaction scale of my

country's sharing economy market is about 3,377.3

billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 2.9%, and the

number of sharing economy service providers is

about 84 million, a year-on-year increase of 7.7%.

We can see from Table 3 that the number of platform

economy practitioners has gradually increased in

recent years.

Table 3: The number of employees of platform enterprises.

Yea

Number of em

ees

2017 5560000

2018 5980000

2019 6230000

2020 6310000

Though the sudden impact of the epidemic, the

total pressure on the employment market, and the

existence of structural problems have brought huge

challenges to the employment situation. However, the

platform economy still plays a pivotal role in

broadening employment channels, enhancing

employment flexibility, and increasing workers'

income. Such a large number of practitioners and

employment fields have also made the protection of

labor rights and interests related to the platform

economy a hot spot and focus of the government and

society.

A large part of China’s platform economy

practitioners have chosen the employment form

relying on the Internet. One is e-commerce logistics,

takeaway, and online car-hailing in the field of life

services; the second is the field of knowledge and

creativity, including online live broadcasts, e-sports,

etc.; the third is the new employment forms derived

from the platform, such as self-media. The business

model of the platforms involves the participation of

three parties: the user or customer of a certain service;

the practitioner (provider or crowd-worker); and the

platform which connects the user and the worker

(Prassl, Risk, 2015).

The working model of platform economy

practitioners is as follows: the enterprise assigns work

tasks to the platform workers, and the workers

provide goods and services to consumers and users.

Workers have no fixed workplace, no fixed working

hours, and no stable source of income. Most of their

income depends on commissions from orders. The

evaluation and complaints of consumers and users are

of great significance to the wages of workers. The

platform system is based on rating mechanisms, in the

light of which customers score and comment on the

service received (McDonald 2016). Take food

delivery as an example, the uncertainty of working

hours enhances the “platform stickiness” of delivery

workers, and they dedicate body and all their labor to

work (Ping 2019), the takeaway courier does not

hesitate to work overtime to take orders to get high

pay and violate the traffic rules to deliver the meals

on time and get praise from customers, and the

takeaway courier has a traffic accident and casualty

rates remain high. Practitioner’s behavior is an

important reference point for customers to evaluate

their services, and practitioners who receive multiple

negative reviews may affect their wages or lose

opportunities to continue working in the platform.

That is to say, the platform uses its advantages to

completely transfer the risk of being unable to

perform its obligations to the employees, thereby

keeping the platform from being damaged (Gramano

2020).

At the same time, the social insurance coverage

rate of the takeaway couriers is low, and their basic

rights and interests cannot be guaranteed. At present,

most of the takeaway couriers sign "cooperation

agreements" with third-party agencies, rather than

labor contracts. The agreement signed by the

takeaway couriers and the third party does not belong

to the scope of labor relations, and there is no such

thing as social security. The characteristics of the

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448

platform economy's de-employment and flexible

labor relations also make it impossible for platform

economy practitioners to obtain the protection of the

current work-related injury insurance system.

3.2 Difficulty of the Platform

Supervision

Some scholars believe that although government

regulation has defects, it still needs government

regulation, and there is information asymmetry in the

market, which is likely to lead to market failure or

market collapse (Akerlof 1970). Compared with the

traditional model, it is more difficult to supervise the

platform economy, and it is tough for the original

government laws and regulations to effectively

restrain it.

At present, there are still many problems that are

difficult to supervise in the process of platform

economic development, such as malicious negative

reviews of platform transactions, platform big data

killing, user data privacy leakage, false propaganda,

traffic fraud, tax evasion by employees, etc. The loose

Internet censorship mechanism and low cost of

dissemination also make supervision more difficult.

Notable among these issues is the leakage of user data

privacy and tax regulation. An important resource for

the operation of the platform economy is user data.

Now platform companies on the market collect, use

and transfer user data without the permission of users,

which brings many problems to government

supervision. For example: On March 20, 2019,

Douyin provided WeChat/QQ platform authorized

sued it in court. On July 4, 2021, the State Office

released a message saying that the “Didi Chuxing”

APP has serious violations of laws and regulations to

collect personal information. According to relevant

regulations, the Cyberspace Administration of China

notified the App Store to remove the “Didi Chuxing”

APP.

The operation of the platform economy involves

multiple links such as information exchange, demand

matching, paperless digital transactions, and delivery

of goods between two or more parties using the

platform as a medium, which makes it difficult to

determine the elements of the tax system. Regulatory

measures such as access conditions are still

incomplete, which has brought a huge impact on tax

supervision. The form of the platform economy has

brought about major changes in taxation objects and

taxpayers. The platform economy has the

characteristics of virtuality, decentralization, cross-

regional nature, and privacy of transaction data. The

traditional tax supervision model shows lag and

inappropriateness.

3.3 Problem of the Platform Monopoly

The rapid development of the platform economy has

accelerated the monopoly of the market and industry.

"Platform monopoly", that is, the common

phenomenon of "winner takes all" in the platform

economy may evolve into a few monopoly platforms

that maintain the status of winners for a long time.

The platform mainly relies on the Internet. The

platform economy has a strong network effect, and its

initial advantages are amplified. The network effect

of the platform makes the utility obtained by users on

one end of the platform subject to the influence of the

scale of users on the other end. The larger the scale of

users, the stronger the utility with the expansion of

the scale, resources will be gathered to a few

platforms, and the strong will become stronger

(Eisenmann, Parker, Alstyne, 2006). At the same

time, the platform's multilateral market is complex

and the relevant market is difficult to define.

Traditional anti-monopoly methods are not

applicable to platform monopoly issues.

Platform monopolies usually take two

forms: first,

mergers or acquisitions between platforms. After

stable development, platform companies usually

occupy a leading position in the market through price

wars. When price wars are in trouble, platform

companies often form new monopoly platforms in the

form of mergers or acquisitions. The second is the

exclusivity strategy. When platform companies

compete with other competitors of the same type, they

rely on their dominant positions to allow platform

users to "choose one". For example, the two giants in

the e-commerce field, Tmall, and JD. pick one of

two". The platform occupies a dominant position in

the market, which means that the platform has a

priority in terms of pricing,

transaction methods, and

responsibility allocation. The expansion and

extension of the power of the platform make it have

jurisdiction over multilateral customers and key

stakeholders, which means that other participants are

in a relatively weak position, lacking the ability to

bargain and make independent choices, which also

creates a series of problems. The commission is too

high, "big data kills cooked", etc. (Liu, Serfes, 2013).

Research on the Development Dilemma of China’s Platform Economy based on Data Mining Technology

449

4 COUNTERMEASURES FOR

SUSTAINABLE

DEVELOPMENT OF

PLATFORM ECONOMY

We should face the development dilemma of the

platform economy, and propose solutions from the

government, the platform, and practitioner. The three

parties are supposed to work together to achieve the

sustainable development of the platform economy.

Their relationship is shown in figure 1.

Figure 1: Relationship between the three parties.

4.1 Government

The government should take active measures to

promote the development of the platform economy.

Strengthen the construction and maintenance of

platform infrastructure, promote the development of

technologies such as big data and artificial

intelligence, and provide important support for the

development of the platform economy.

Formulate and improve relevant policies, laws,

and regulations. On the one hand, it needs to solve the

problem of protecting the rights and interests of

current platform practitioners, and reasonably define

the nature of workers in the new form of employment.

On July 16, 2021, eight departments including the

Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security

jointly issued the "Guiding Opinions on Safeguarding

the Rights and Interests of Laborers in New

Employment Forms" and proposed the "Labor

Trichotomy", which is considered to realize the

development of the platform economy and new forms

of employment. An important measure to balance the

protection of labor rights and interests. The

government should actively promote the

implementation and implementation of relevant

policies. On the other hand, through the revision of

the Anti-Monopoly Law, the problem of platform

monopoly in the process of platform economic

development is solved. The government should build

a tax legal system that meets the needs of platform

economic development, learn from the tax practices

of other countries, and revise and improve my

country's existing tax laws according to local

conditions.

Optimize regulatory measures. Strengthen the

supervision of the behavior of the platform, actively

identify potential harmful behaviors and urge and

assist the platform to solve them, protect the privacy

of users, and maintain a fair market competition

environment and a good consumption environment.

4.2 Platform

Establish bottom-line thinking and clarify their

corporate rights, responsibilities, and obligations.

For employees, it should protect their legitimate

rights and interests by laws and regulations, improve

the income system of employees, and at the same time

strengthen investment in education and training for

employees to improve their skills.

For the platform, it is necessary to strengthen

innovation, promote its integration with other

industries, and maintain its market position in the

market, rather than maintaining its competitive

advantage in unreasonable ways such as market

exclusivity strategies. And the platform should

operate and pay taxes following the law. Comply with

various government regulatory measures and

strengthen the platform's governance and supervision

of the entire business ecosystem. Protect the rights

and interests of consumers and create a good

atmosphere for consumption.

4.3 Practitioner

Make good use of legal weapons to protect their

legitimate rights and interests, platform practitioners,

as direct providers of services, should study the law,

understand the law, abide by the law, and use it.

Improve personal skills. In the future, more

industrial populations will be converted into

practitioners of the platform economy, and the

platform labor population will become increasingly

prominent (Ping, Magasic, 2016). Such a large

number of employed people contribute their vitality

to the social economy. However, many practitioners

are caught in "youth meal anxiety". Although the

platform economy provides more employment

opportunities and lowers the threshold for

employment, knowledge is still essential for the

workers. The platform economy will lead to a

polarization of the employment structure, with the

employment and salary of high-skilled and low-

skilled workers increasing, while the employment

and salary of medium-skilled workers decrease.

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Therefore, practitioners should strengthen their re-

education and improve their knowledge and skills.

Possess good professional quality and moral

awareness, they should be responsible for their work,

adhere to their professional bottom line, and abide by

national laws and regulations.

5 CONCLUSIONS

The vigorous development of the platform economy

has not only changed people's production and

lifestyle, but it is also of great significance in

promoting economic development and providing

employment opportunities. As a new thing, it still

faces many difficulties in the process of development.

To promote its long-term development, it is necessary

to work together to create a good environment for the

development of the platform economy.

The Chinese government should not only promote

its development but also strengthen supervision and

legal constraints on the platform economy. Platforms

should also strengthen their construction and

maintain social responsibilities. Platform

practitioners should also focus on improving their

skills. In a word, as a new economic and employment

form, the platform economy has broad for

development, but attention should be paid to its

construction and management.

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