Deconstructing How Digital Transformation Affects Enterprise Cost Stickiness
Against the dual backdrop of the global digital wave and the upgrading of enterprise cost management, cost stickiness, as a core feature of dynamic adjustment of enterprise costs, is undergoing technological reconstruction and paradigm shift. Based on adjustment cost theory, agency theory and resource-based view, this article systematically deconstructs the four mechanisms by which digital transformation affects enterprise cost stickiness: technology empowerment reshapes cost structure, data-driven optimization of expectation management, organizational change alleviates agency problems, and ecological synergy softens transaction contracts. The study found that digital transformation, through the two-way effects of "rigid cost intelligence" and "elastic cost precision", can not only strengthen the technical specificity of fixed costs, but also significantly reduce adjustment costs and decision-making deviations, ultimately forming a differentiated sticky evolution path. Combining typical cases and practical difficulties, this article proposes a "technology-data-organization-ecology" collaborative optimization framework to provide theoretical support and action guidance for enterprises to solve the "transformation paradox" and build a flexible cost system.
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