As a prominent restrictive competition practice in the platform economy, "forced exclusivity" (where platform companies require merchants to operate exclusively on one platform) has drawn widespread public attention. This paper systematically analyzes the characteristics, competitive effects, and antitrust regulatory challenges of such practices, drawing on China's enforcement prac-tices and comparative studies to propose pathways for improving antitrust reg-ulation. Research shows that forced exclusivity significantly restricts com-peti-tion, not only undermining merchants' multi-ownership rights and con-sumers' freedom of choice but also weakening market innovation incentives. Chinese antitrust authorities have developed distinctive regulatory approaches through cases involving Alibaba and Meituan, including innovative market defi-nition methods, establishing a "punitive and incentivizing" analytical frame-work, and introducing flexible regulatory mechanisms like administrative guid-ance docu-ments. Future efforts should focus on optimizing market definition criteria by incorporating network externalities into illegal determination, building a "reg-ulatory sandbox" with compliance incentive mechanisms, and deepening mul-ti-stakeholder collaborative governance to achieve dynamic equilibrium be-tween platform economic innovation and regulation.
L. Chen (2025) studied this question.