arXiv:2603.23685econ.THcs.CY2026-03

AI降低创作门槛,但创作者增多反而让每个人更难成功。

The Economics of Builder Saturation in Digital Markets

  • 构建注意力有限与生产无限的模型,解释创作者激增为何导致收益下降。
  • 实证显示平均回报递减,市场集中度上升,呈现幂律分布特征。
  • 适合关注AI创业、数字市场竞争机制的研究者与从业者阅读。

生成式AI的进展大幅降低了数字生产的成本,催生了大众参与软件开发将带来大量可行公司的叙事。本文对此提出质疑,引入‘建造者饱和效应’,构建一个生产弹性扩张但人类注意力有限的模型。在边际成本接近零且自由进入的市场中,生产者数量增加会稀释平均注意力和每位生产者的回报,尽管总产出上升。拓展模型以包含质量异质性和强化动态后,发现均衡结果表现为平均收益下降与集中度上升,符合幂律分布特征。这些结果表明,AI赋能的普惠化生产更可能加剧竞争并产生赢家通吃局面,而非广泛分布的创业成功。本文主要为理论整合与应用形式化,结合了注意力稀缺、自由进入稀释、超级明星效应、优先连接等既有理论,形成统一框架,并针对当前关于AI驱动创业的主流观点提出预测。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Recent advances in generative AI systems have dramatically reduced the cost of digital production, fueling narratives that widespread participation in software creation will yield a proliferation of viable companies. This paper challenges that assumption. We introduce the Builder Saturation Effect, formalizing a model in which production scales elastically but human attention remains finite. In markets with near-zero marginal costs and free entry, increases in the number of producers dilute average attention and returns per producer, even as total output expands. Extending the framework to incorporate quality heterogeneity and reinforcement dynamics, we show that equilibrium outcomes exhibit declining average payoffs and increasing concentration, consistent with power-law-like distributions. These results suggest that AI-enabled, democratised production is more likely to intensify competition and produce winner-take-most outcomes than to generate broadly distributed entrepreneurial success. Contribution type: This paper is primarily a work of synthesis and applied formalisation. The individual theoretical ingredients - attention scarcity, free-entry dilution, superstar effects, preferential attachment - are well established in their respective literatures. The contribution is to combine them into a unified framework and direct the resulting predictions at a specific contemporary claim about AI-enabled entrepreneurship.

数字市场注意力经济AI创业

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