A methodology for assessing high-Tech regulation: a legitimacy perspective

ABSTRACT

This study examines necessary and sufficient conditions in terms of legitimacy with respect to digital platform regulation in the context of today’s development and refinement of sophisticated science and technology. With the increasing oligopoly of platforms, the government has established data portability that can be shifted from a particular platform at any time, creating an environment in which new platform-based businesses can emerge and vigorous competition can take place. In terms of legitimacy, this article considers the following necessary conditions: first, sociological acceptance; second, moral legitimacy; and third, reliance on a foundation that is inherently uncertain but is allowable through expectations of the future. As a sufficient condition, the article also discusses applying social psychology’s elaboration likelihood model, which explains how persuasion is particularly effective in changing people’s attitudes. This approach analyzes ‘resources’ and ‘reflectivity’ in terms of motivating content processing, and ‘expertise’, ‘cognition’, and ‘consequences’ in terms of judging the message based on non-essential peripheral cues. In addition, the point of causality is also examined, and, here, further empirical analysis is needed. The digital platform regulation that has been introduced in Japan has not been clarified in terms of necessity and sufficiency.

KEYWORDS:

• Competition
• digital platform regulation
• legitimacy
• necessity condition
• sufficient condition

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank Yoshitaka Tsuruta and Shuhei Yamashita for their helpful suggestions during this article's preparation. We also thank Takayuki Nago and Takako Ishihara for their useful comments and extend our gratitude to the participants of the 2020 Annual Meeting of the Japan Economic Policy Association. We thank Valeria Falce and the participants of the 15^th ASCOLA conference for their positive comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported, in part, by Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research (19K02018 and 19K01610) Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and the Telecommunications Advancement Foundation.