With the development of digital transformation, data has become the core element determining market competition in the digital economy. While China has made significant progress in the construction of data element markets, there are still inadequacies in terms of scale, structure, and operational mechanisms. Therefore, RIDE plans to conduct research in the following two areas:

Firstly, regarding the market competition mechanisms for data elements, challenges such as administrative monopolies resulting from improper government interventions, monopolistic behavior arising from improper competition by companies, and the segmentation of regional data trading platforms and mechanisms have had a significant impact on the competition order of data element markets. This situation is not conducive to fully realizing the value of data elements in China and poses significant market and policy risks to digital transformation. Therefore, it is necessary to study how to design reasonable digital regulatory policies that strike a reasonable balance between the optimal use of data elements and market risk control.

Secondly, as most business operations of internet platform companies are data-driven, their commercial promotions, precision marketing, and product iterations rely on the extensive collection and utilization of data. Consequently, data produced from consumer information has become the core production factor for the development and profitability of platform companies. Innovating business revenue models based on data collection and usage has become the commercial goal pursued by various platform companies. However, the failure to fully respect the ownership, usage rights, value-added rights, and supervisory rights of consumer personal information data has led to data security risks caused by the misuse and abuse of personal information and rampant data monopolies. Therefore, researching the conflict mechanisms between data monopolies, market competition, and consumer information protection, and designing micro mechanisms for consumer information protection based on this, will be another important research direction in the data element field.