Land rent theory and rent research of digital platform enterprises

Marxist land rent theory has unveiled the nature and source of land rent, providing the rationale for discussing the distribution of total social products among wages, profits, and land rents. This paper has systematically summarized the development of Marxist land rent theory and its application in the field of digital platform research by constructing the mathematical-political economic model on this basis, we divide digital platform enterprises' revenues obtained into average profit, differential rent, and monopoly rent, and then discuss the source and impact of each part of the revenues respectively. Our study finds that: First, digital platform enterprises need to obtain average profit to compensate for the investment in providing digital space, products, and services, satisfying the fundamental requirement for an equal amount of capital to obtain an equal amount of profit. Second, on the premise of improving production efficiency, digital platform enterprises transfer surplus-profit from the general productive departments in the form of differential rent, whereas having no influence on the average profit of the general productive department. Third, digital platform enterprises can redistribute social revenues by collecting monopoly rent, and the excessive expansion of the scale of monopoly rent will inevitably squeeze the average profit of the general productive department, affecting the requirements of capital accumulation for reproduction on an extended scale and the proportional relationship between departments in social reproduction. Therefore, in order to guide the healthy development of digital platform enterprises, we should meticulously examine the role of digital platform enterprises from the change of overall social-economic efficiency, understand the nature of different types of rents, and evaluate the dynamic impact of digital platform enterprises' overall revenues on the change of the whole society's average profit rate.