Igor Stepnov, Julia Kovalchuk, Nurul Mohammad Zayed
The article concerns the interpretation of the essence, content and characteristics of productive forces in the digital economy formation and development. The research background is in the fact that digitalization does not change the essence of capitalist relations in society, but technological changes dictate the need to clarify the digitalization impact as a new factor in economic theories, as well as to consider the competition between two new models of capitalism - centralized (platform) and distributed ones, which makes it possible to correctly provide an economic picture of the digitalization effects. If the first model tends to continue the development of the vertical integration concept (including data), then the second is more attractive for horizontal integration. It is substantiated that the productive forces in a digital society should include not only material but also information factors, and the newly created information and communication means of production associated with them. The research results include both an assessment of the shared economy impact and a new balance of competition and coordination in the markets. The thesis about the distributed decisions definition through the proprietary right (in contrast to the classical one - through the proprietary right) made it possible to formulate the goals and limitations of the development of a capitalism distributed model in the modern economy.