讲座人：袁哲，浙江大学

讲座时间：2026年4月17日上午10:30-12:00

讲座地点：北京大学国家发展研究院承泽园校区249教室

讲座题目：Leveling the Playing Field: the Effect of AI on Small and Medium-Sized Firms

内容简介：This paper examines whether platform-enabled AI tools can enable small firms to narrow the capability gap with larger incumbents in digital marketplaces. We study the staggered adoption of an AI tool — automated content generation and data analytics — launched in April 2024 on a leading Chinese e-commerce platform. Leveraging a proprietary firm-level panel of over 4.9 million firm-month observations from October 2023 to July 2025, we combine propensity score matching with difference-in-differences estimation across twelve adoption cohorts. We find that AI adoption increases average sales by 69.9%, driven primarily by a 63.2% rise in order volume, with broad improvements across discoverability, quality, and innovation. These gains are sharply heterogeneous by firm size: bottom-quartile firms experience 75.8% sales growth — nearly four times the 19.9% gain of top-quartile firms — with disproportionate improvements in other dimensions of firm performance. Mechanism analyses reveal that AI reduces labor costs, alleviates information asymmetries, and facilitates skill acquisition, with all three effects concentrated among smaller firms. Results are robust to instrumental variable, staggered DiD, and synthetic DiD approaches. Overall, the evidence suggests that when made accessible with low adoption costs, AI can narrow pre-existing capability gaps rather than exacerbate them, fostering upward mobility among small firms and enhancing market dynamism.

主讲人简介：袁哲博士，浙江大学经济学院百人计划研究员、博士生导师，先后获北京大学学士学位和多伦多大学博士学位。其研究主要聚焦产业组织与数字经济，运用实验与结构模型等方法，系统研究人工智能经济学、数据要素价值与经济网络等重要议题。在人工智能经济学方面，重点关注人工智能对消费者决策、企业生产率、劳动供给以及算法治理的影响；在数据价值方面，着重研究数据要素价值的量化测度、作用机制、信息设计与数据治理；在网络行业方面，主要研究航空、网约车和电信网络等领域的市场运行与资源配置问题。相关成果发表于 Rand Journal of Economics、American Economic Journal: Microeconomics、Management Science、Information Systems Research、Manufacturing & Service Operations Management 等国际顶级经济管理学期刊。

组织者：

（国家发展研究院 ）李力行、席天扬、王轩、徐化愚、于航、易君健、黄清扬

（经济学院）刘冲、吴群峰、曹光宇、年永威

（光华管理学院）张晓波、仇心诚