Abstract: This paper extends the Bakos (1997) model and analyzes the impact of ecommerce market development on the gap between urban and rural areas. Theoretical analysis shows that, because of the differences in search costs between rural and urban areas, consumers in rural areas will gain more utility from the traditional physical market to ecommerce market than consumers in urban areas. Therefore, the penetration of ecommerce in the residents will more promote the consumption of rural residents, thereby narrowing the gap between urban and rural consumption. Due to the lack of standardized operation system and related supporting facilities, there has been a huge deficit between the upstream of agricultural products and downstream of industrial products. The penetration of ecommerce in enterprises will be more conducive to the sale of urban industrial products to rural areas, thus widening the gap between urban and rural areas. That is, the development of ecommerce market will produce two opposite effects on the gap between urban and rural areas through double penetration. But its net effect is to narrow the gap between urban and rural consumption. The empirical test based on China's provincial panel data from 2013 to 2016 shows that the theoretical analysis has good robustness, that is, the expansion of ecommerce market scale at the present stage helps to narrow the gap between urban and rural consumption in China.

Key words: ecommerce market , urban and rural gap , search cost

摘要： 本文扩展Bakos（1997）的模型，用以分析电商市场发展对中国城乡消费差距的影响。理论分析表明，由于农村地区和城镇地区的搜寻成本存在差异，当消费场景由传统实体市场转向电商市场时，农村居民将获得比城镇居民更大的效用提升。电商对居民消费的渗透会更多地促进农村居民消费，进而缩小城乡消费差距。同时，由于缺乏标准化运作体系及相关配套设施，电商市场在促进农产品上行和工业品下行方面存在巨大逆差，电商在企业中的渗透更有利于城市工业品销往农村，进而扩大城乡消费差距。也就是说，电商市场发展对城乡消费差距有完全相反的两种影响，但其净效应是缩小城乡消费差距。基于2013—2016年中国省级面板数据的实证检验表明，理论分析的预示具有较好的稳健性，即现阶段电商市场规模的扩大有助于缩小中国城乡消费差距。

关键词: 电商市场 , 城乡差距 , 搜寻成本