Digital economy and new capitalism: Generation Z as consumer

Abstract

The development of the digital economy and the 4th Industrial Revolution (IV R) bring new dilemmas to economics. The challenges are numerous, and in our paper, we concentrated on two important phenomena of digitalization: (1) whether data has become an equally important factor of production as capital, labor, and land and (2) what changes occur in the structure of costs with the appearance of digital goods. Bearing in mind that these changes were deeply reflected both on the supply and demand side, in this paper, we have devoted special attention to the behavior of Generations Z and Alpha as consumers compared to other generations. We wanted to see, at least preliminarily, what kind of consumer profile is formed by the new generations born in the digital age and IV IR, that is, what kind of changes are occurring in the behavior of consumers of Generations Z and Alpha. We carried out research on their behavior on a sample of over 500 respondents.