Purpose The establishment of data trading platform drives regional cultural consumption by advancing the digital infrastructure. This study conducts an empirical analysis to examine the impact of data trading platform on regional cultural consumption. Additionally, it incorporates regional cultural innovation capacity, regional economic agglomeration level, residents' per capita income, and cultural product supply capacity as intermediate variables to explore the underlying mechanisms of such impact. Design/methodology/approach Collecting provincial panel data of 30 Chinese provinces from 2013 to 2023, we use a multi-period difference-in-differences method, a threshold model and four intermediary effect tests to verify the research hypothesis, a spatial Durbin model to further explore the spatial spillover effect of data trading platform. Findings Data trading platform can significantly increase regional cultural consumption levels, but the impact has a certain lag and the conclusion is still valid after the robustness test. Heterogeneity analysis shows that the promoting effect varies with the levels of marketization, urbanization and regional economy. Mechanism analysis shows that data trading platform can indirectly promote the cultural consumption levels by enhancing regional cultural innovation capacity, regional economic agglomeration level, per capita income of residents and supply capacity of cultural products. Education levels play a nonlinear moderating role in the impact of the establishment of data trading platform on regional cultural consumption levels. Data trading platform has a positive spatial spillover effect on cultural consumption in the surrounding areas. Originality/value This paper studies the impact of the establishment of data trading platform on regional cultural consumption, and complements the literature on the impact of data element configuration on macro consumption behavior, which is of great importance for continuously expanding the scale of cultural consumption and contributing to cultural common prosperity.
Ren et al. (Mon,) studied this question.