Abstract:

The market is competitive when it creates opportunities for all possible entities interested in providing goods for which there is actual or potential demand to operate freely. In economic theory, only a competitive market ensures the optimal allocation of resources. The resources purchased and consumed are not competitive in themselves, because they acquire this property only as a result of production activity aimed at satisfying needs in accordance with the hierarchy of their values. Competitiveness is understood as the ability to compete, but also the conditions in which competition takes place, are favoring innovation and an increase in economic efficiency. In the case of the digital market, competitiveness is combined with the network effect, meaning the exponential growth in the number of users of the good in an unusually short time, a strong increase in market share in the initial phase, and an increasingly dynamic increase in income. The rapid growth in the electronic market is perceived as an anomalous phenomenon against the background of the traditional market, where growth is rather linear. Researchers of the electronic economy unanimously recognize the exponential growth model as a typical phenomenon, and the network effect as a factor driving this dynamics. Therefore, treating the network effect as a factor disrupting the market mechanism and the competition resulting from it is a denial of the properties of information and communication technology itself, which is the foundation of the electronic economy, in which small companies also operate. A more beneficial approach is to internalize this phenomenon in the strategies of all e-business enterprises. Managing on the electronic market under the pressure of high environmental variability requires proper anticipation of classical economic phenomena, which, thanks to the use of ICT, change market relations in the sphere of organized effort to produce goods and their subsequent exchange on the market. In addition to inclusive Internet technology, objective conditions for the functioning of the market mechanism are ensured by the freedom of action of entities guided primarily by market premises for setting prices and the course of the competition process. Internet platforms implement innovative solutions and breakthrough technologies, creating their own, competitive market ecosystems. For example, AI is considered, on the one hand, to be inhibitors of the development of ebusiness and the digital market, and on the other hand, to be entities blocking the development of, among others, by focusing on at least maintaining the developed competitive advantage, if not increasing it through the automation of many business processes.