Econ Papers Daily / 工作论文
生成式AI中的竞争：来自消费者需求的证据
Competition in Generative AI: Evidence from Consumer Demand
摘要
How competitive will the market for generative AI be as it matures? Using novel transaction level credit and debit card data covering 174 million consumers and 114 billion transactions, we study the adoption of paid services and the demand-side foundations of competition in this market. As of April 2026, approximately 2.9% of U.S. consumers pay for at least one major generative AI service, with adoption highest among younger and higher-income consumers. Nearly all of these paid users subscribe to basic plans that cost $30 or less per month. Three patterns suggest limited differentiation and low switching costs. First, although multihoming is common, it has declined as providers’ capabilities have expanded. Second, annual customer retention rates range from 20% to 45% across major AI providers, lower than those for many other subscription products. Third, switching rises around major model releases. Motivated by these findings, we develop and estimate a structural model of AI service demand and supply that reveals strong competitive pressure. Consumers are highly price sensitive, have much weaker preferences for particular providers than for AI overall, and view AI services as increasingly close substitutes. Our results suggest that, absent a substantial increase in AI model quality differentiation, growing substitutability among services will constrain providers’ pricing power and allow consumers to capture a large share of the surplus generated by these services.
中文摘要
随着生成式AI市场走向成熟，其竞争程度将如何？我们使用涵盖1.74亿消费者和1140亿笔交易的新颖交易级信用卡和借记卡数据，研究付费服务的采用以及该市场需求的竞争基础。截至2026年4月，约2.9%的美国消费者为至少一项主要生成式AI服务付费，采用率在年轻和高收入消费者中最高。几乎所有付费用户都订阅每月费用不超过30美元的基础计划。三种模式表明差异化有限且转换成本较低。第一，尽管多归属很常见，但随着提供商能力的扩展，多归属有所下降。第二，主要AI提供商的年度客户留存率在20%至45%之间，低于许多其他订阅产品。第三，转换在主要模型发布前后上升。受这些发现启发，我们构建并估计了一个AI服务需求与供给的结构模型，揭示了强大的竞争压力。消费者对价格高度敏感，对特定提供商的偏好远弱于对AI整体的偏好，并且认为AI服务日益成为接近的替代品。我们的结果表明，在AI模型质量差异化没有大幅增加的情况下，服务之间日益增强的可替代性将限制提供商的定价能力，并让消费者获取这些服务所产生剩余的大部分。