ABSTRACT This paper investigates the direct, mediating, and nonlinear effects of digital economy development on energy efficiency using panel data from 30 Chinese provinces spanning 2011–2022. The empirical strategy integrates instrumental variable estimation, mediation analysis, and threshold regression, complemented by extensive robustness checks. The findings reveal three key results. First, the direct effect of digitalization on energy efficiency is significantly positive, confirming its average contributive role. Second, mediation analysis identifies the following four significant transmission pathways: Technological innovation and economic growth operate as competitive mediators, while energy consumption structure and industrial structure function as indirect‐only mediators. Third, threshold analysis uncovers a distinct nonlinear pattern: digitalization promotes energy efficiency at low development levels but exhibits a negative effect during intermediate stages, with marketization serving as the critical unlocking condition. These findings are validated through comprehensive robustness checks, including varying‐coefficient modeling, spatial spillover analysis, dynamic lag specifications, and COVID‐19 pandemic controls. This study demonstrates that digitalization's energy efficiency dividend is positive on average yet contingent on development stages and regional conditions. Market‐oriented institutional reforms are essential for unlocking this potential, and differentiated policies should be designed according to specific threshold conditions.
ABSTRACT Drawing on recent research on digital entrepreneurship, digital technologies are reshaping the landscape of entrepreneurial opportunities. However, how the digital economy (DE) influences entrepreneurial activity (EA) in county‐level areas has not yet been fully examined. Using county‐level panel data from China for the period 2014–2020, this paper investigates the impact of DE development on EA and explores the underlying mechanisms. We find that the development of the DE significantly promotes EA in county‐level areas. Mechanism analysis reveals that increases in residents' disposable income and foreign direct investment serve as key transmission channels. Further analysis shows that the local business environment positively moderates this relationship. These findings carry clear policy implications. The government should coordinate the advancement of digital infrastructure, the expansion of consumer markets, and the continuous improvement of the institutional environment to fully unleash entrepreneurial vitality in county‐level areas.
ABSTRACT Dishonest behavior is a pervasive phenomenon that imposes substantial economic and social costs on society. While the literature extensively documents gender differences in who lies, far less attention has been paid to whether sellers discriminate in their dishonesty based on the gender of the buyer. The present study addresses this gap using a field experiment conducted in the used car market. A gender‐balanced group of buyers conducted 360 paired phone calls in response to 180 used car advertisements. The buyers incorporated a subtle inaccuracy related to the advertised offer. Seller dishonesty was identified when sellers did not correct the inaccuracy. All sellers in the sample were male, reflecting the fact that men constitute the overwhelming majority of private sellers in this market. Results show that sellers exhibited dishonest behavior in 30% of all calls. Two competing accounts generate opposing predictions: a perceived‐vulnerability account, under which women are stereotyped as easier to mislead, predicts more dishonesty toward female buyers, whereas a moral‐protection account, under which the same harm is judged less severely when it befalls a man, predicts more dishonesty toward male buyers. Consistent with the latter, sellers were significantly more likely to be dishonest toward male than toward female buyers. However, among those sellers who did behave dishonestly, the degree of overstatement did not differ by buyer gender. The key predictors of seller dishonesty were seller price flexibility, buyer gender (male), lower vocal confidence of the buyer, and older car age. These findings contribute to the limited literature on dishonesty directed at specific demographic targets and underscore that, at least in price negotiations, male buyers are not shielded from exploitation.
ABSTRACT Against intensifying market competition, supply chain green collaborative innovation (SCGCI) has evolved into a vital strategic option through which firms reduce operating costs, enhance firm value, and alleviate financing constraints, while digital transformation has become a strategic capability through which supply chain participants optimize long‐term profitability and sustain competitive advantage. Therefore, exploring how corporate digitalization shapes SCGCI carries prominent theoretical and practical value for corporate strategic decision‐making and industrial competition governance. This study introduces digitalization into a dynamic game model to investigate how digitalization reshapes firms' profit‐maximizing decisions and strategic interactions with supply chain partners under competitive market settings. It theoretically examines the mechanisms through which digitalization influences SCGCI and empirically tests them using data from listed companies between 2007 and 2023. The results reveal that supply chain collaboration is the optimal strategic decision for enterprises to balance innovation costs and competitive advantages. The digitalization of enterprises effectively stimulates SCGCI, with variations depending on market environments and firm‐specific characteristics. The facilitating effect of enterprises' digitalization on SCGCI is primarily mediated through the enhancement of interfirm trust and the reduction of barriers to collaboration. Additionally, government subsidies, digital regulation, and enterprise environmental information disclosure play a significant positive moderating role in this relationship. Further analysis indicates that digitalization has a spillover effect on upstream and downstream enterprises, reshaping the strategic landscape of the supply chain. SCGCI successfully translates into tangible financial benefits; it can significantly augment corporate value and lower financing constraints, thereby strengthening long‐term market competitiveness. This study provides managerial economics insights into how firms strategically employ digital transformation to coordinate innovation investments, enhance competitive performance, and improve economic returns through supply chain collaboration.
ABSTRACT As automobiles evolve from hardware products into intelligent product–service systems, distribution and service systems are deconstructed from integrated dealership channels into specialized functional nodes. Industry practice gives rise to five structures: traditional dealer‐reselling, direct‐selling, hybrid, cooperative, and transition. This study investigates when manufacturers should deconstruct the traditional structure and how they should restructure downstream channels. We develop sequential game models for these structures, distinguishing digital services, presale experience services, and after‐sales maintenance services. They incorporate data value, after‐sales data empowerment, presale experience preference, and OTA after‐sales substitution. We identify a service investment efficiency index to characterize market orientation: Low values indicate service‐oriented markets, and high values indicate price‐oriented markets. The results show that (1) channel deconstruction outperforms the traditional structure in most feasible combinations of data value and market orientation. The traditional structure remains preferred only in a very low‐index region where dealer‐side service provision generates high demand returns. (2) Among deconstructed structures, direct‐selling occupies the broadest optimal region. Transition is preferred under low‐data‐value or high‐index boundaries, cooperative under high‐data‐value or stronger market‐pressure boundaries, and the baseline hybrid forms no stable dominant region. (3) Higher data value, after‐sales data empowerment, and presale experience preference promote intelligence upgrading and service investment, whereas OTA after‐sales substitution weakens offline after‐sales incentives. The hybrid extension shows that vertical coopetition in after‐sales service increases service efforts, the manufacturer's after‐sales allocation share, and manufacturer profit.
ABSTRACT We investigate the effect of shame (due to low performance) and pride (due to high performance) in a team contest. When a player feels more strongly about shame and pride, he exerts higher equilibrium effort, but his teammate exerts lower equilibrium effort, ultimately leading to a positive overall effect on the team's equilibrium winning probability. A team's success depends on the sum of its members' emotional weight parameters rather than on their individual values. We then analyze a team design game in which each team owner strategically makes a costly investment to increase his team's total weight of shame–pride utility.
ABSTRACT This paper develops a sequential model to examine start‐up acquisitions in markets with network externalities, incorporating a pre‐entry strategic buyout option that allows the incumbent to integrate the start‐up's innovation, followed by post‐entry expenditure on coordination advertising, and defensive pricing strategies. We introduce asymmetric advertising efficiency combined with a stochastic success function to show that incumbents can utilise buyouts as a strategic entry‐deterrence mechanism. When a buyout occurs, dominant incumbents optimally integrate the acquired innovation to sell a superior product rather than executing a ‘killer acquisition’. Furthermore, our model demonstrates that strategic buyouts are most likely when start‐ups face moderate entry costs but offer highly valuable innovations. If entry is accommodated, the incumbent's superior advertising efficiency grants it a strictly higher probability of securing the coordinated demand without requiring a larger advertising budget. Our findings suggest that an incumbent's ability to maintain market dominance is sensitive to the size of the fixed cost of entry and the strength of the network externality. While buyouts eliminate fixed entry costs and expenditure on coordination advertising, they prevent post‐entry price competition, and the distinct utility consumers derive from product variety. Notably, we prove that the more dominant an incumbent is before an acquisition, the greater the technological upgrade it must provide for the buyout to be strictly welfare enhancing. Consequently, our findings provide strong theoretical support for expanded, case‐by‐case antitrust scrutiny of start‐up acquisitions in markets with network externalities.
In recent years, the development of data factor markets has emerged as a key component in promoting the market-based allocation of production factors. This paper takes data trading platforms as the focal point and empirically investigates the impact of data factor market development on firm internationalization using panel data of A-share listed companies from 2011 to 2023. Our findings reveal that the establishment of data factor markets significantly promotes firm internationalization, with this conclusion remaining robust after a series of endogeneity corrections and robustness checks. Mechanism analysis reveals that data factor market development enhances firms' internationalization by easing financing constraints and improving supply chain structures, thereby enabling more effective acquisition and upgrading of resources and capabilities. Further analysis suggests that entrepreneurial spirit positively moderates this relationship by strengthening firms' risk-taking awareness, thus reinforcing the effect of data market development on internationalization. This study advances the understanding of firm internationalization within the digital economy context while offering theoretical insights and practical guidance for enhancing data infrastructure and improving related policy design.
Content monetization on digital platforms, such as YouTube and TikTok, primarily relies on advertising and video views. Content creators typically employ two advertising strategies: obvious advertising and subliminal advertising. The former is a traditional and easily recognizable advertisement, whereas the latter is subtly integrated into the video content, and thus less perceptible to viewers. This study develops a game-theoretical model in which creators strategically choose advertising strategies and the amount of advertising, while user viewing behavior is affected by both advertising and content quality. We examine the impact of market factors (such as the user satiation rates, creators' unit advertising revenue, and the cost of producing subliminal advertising) on video content creation and explore the ensuing implications for creator payoff and user surplus. Our analysis yields several novel insights. First, contrary to the conventional view that excessive advertising is primarily associated with low-quality content, we find that high-quality videos may also carry substantial advertising. Moreover, creators may reduce the amount of advertising even when higher unit advertising revenue is attainable, reflecting a strategic trade-off between advertising and overall monetization. Second, subliminal advertising has a dual effect on content creation. While its heightened concealment may encourage creators to produce more high-quality videos, it can also redirect effort toward advertising design rather than content improvement. Third, under certain conditions, higher unit advertising revenue benefits both the creator payoff and user surplus, indicating that profitability and user welfare are not necessarily in conflict. Finally, when the cost of designing subliminal advertising is moderate, competition among creators leads to excessive subliminal advertising and reduces creator payoff, consistent with the Tragedy of the Commons. In this case, obvious advertising dominates; otherwise, subliminal advertising is preferred. These insights offer actionable guidance for creators in choosing advertising strategies and determining the amount of advertising to balance monetization incentives and user experience on digital platforms.
This paper examines the effects of horizontal partial cross ownership (PCO) in a vertical bargaining framework. We show that downstream PCO operates through two opposing mechanisms. The horizontal concentration effect raises prices, whereas the vertical mitigation effect lowers prices by enhancing buyer power and mitigating double marginalization. When the vertical mitigation effect prevails, downstream PCO yields pro-competitive outcomes and improves welfare. In contrast, upstream PCO erodes downstream firms' bargaining leverage, dampening these pro-competitive benefits and leading to anti-competitive outcomes once it exceeds a critical threshold. Under upstream monopoly, downstream PCO has no impact on wholesale pricing, leaving only the anti-competitive horizontal concentration effect.
ABSTRACT This paper examines whether institutional ownership with different investment horizons is related to corporate breakthrough innovation, using panel data of Chinese A‐share listed firms from 2014 to 2023. Long‐term institutional ownership is positively and significantly associated with breakthrough innovation, while short‐term institutional ownership has no robust effect. Long‐term institutional ownership is also related to incremental innovation, but the coefficient and economic magnitude are larger for breakthrough innovation. The results are robust to alternative measures, including technological novelty, total citations of granted invention patents, and external citations. They also hold under several endogeneity mitigation tests, including first‐difference estimation, propensity score matching, entropy balancing, and a two‐period‐ahead placebo test. Accordingly, the paper interprets the evidence as a robust association rather than a definitive causal effect. Further analysis offers marginal evidence that market competition may strengthen the association between long‐term institutional ownership and breakthrough innovation. The association is more evident among firms with lower financing constraints, high‐tech firms, young firms, and firms with higher media attention. The findings contribute to the literature on institutional investor heterogeneity and corporate innovation from the perspective of patient capital and offer evidence relevant to the allocation of long‐term capital toward high‐quality innovation.
ABSTRACT Disruptions triggered by events such as COVID‐19 have revealed the scarcity of logistics resources. Logistics shared electric vehicles (LSEVs) enhance emergency flexibility, yet competition and sustainability between incumbent and entrant LSEV operators remain underexplored. This study develops supply chain models with an incumbent and an entrant LSEV operator to systematically examine how market factors affect strategic cooperation with a promotion platform, optimal rental prices, and profitability. We further employ a complex nonlinear dynamical system Markov framework to characterize how the magnitude of price adjustment influences system stability. The results show that (1) when the platform's promotion level or its efficiency coefficient is low, or when the promotion fee rate or crowding‐out coefficient is high, platform cooperation induces destructive price competition; (2) as the level of carbon emission reduction technology increases, LSEV profits exhibit an inverted‐U pattern. Under high service homogeneity and a low carbon trading price, operators without carbon emission reduction technology upgrades may engage in free‐riding; (3) increasing the failure rate of either operator's vehicle triggers a downward price spiral for both parties; (4) the combination of higher carbon‐quota levels and their trading prices alleviate the cost burden of carbon emission reduction upgrades; and (5) overly aggressive price adjustment by either party can generate chaotic price dynamics and reduce long‐run expected profits, whereas introducing a delay‐control method effectively restores system stability.
This study investigates how participants in competition react to gender stereotypes in performance. We propose two novel gender-oriented tasks: clicking as a male-oriented task and face recall as a female-oriented task with two treatment conditions, which can strengthen shared gender stereotypes and foster gender competition. The gender performance gap in these two tasks clearly exists in the baseline and prevails across treatments, while it disappears or widens affected by our conditions. We clearly observe the positive effect of winning in both tasks. This comes from losers' performance changes: The performance of losers with a dominated stereotype deteriorated in the dominated task. Our results suggest that task stereotypes affect performance of dominated groups, discouraging losers, with potential implications for productivity in competitive workplaces.
This study investigates the effect of local gambling culture, an informal institution commonly associated with risk-seeking behavior, on US firms' scope expansion decisions during the 2004-2021 period. Contrary to prevailing evidence that gambling-prone environments foster speculative corporate behavior, I find that firms headquartered in gambling-prone states engage more actively in related scope expansions primarily for diversification rather than speculation. The diversification purpose is manifested via lower earnings volatility, reduced financial constraints, improved stock performance, and the concentrated effect among cyclical industries. Cross-sectional tests further show that this effect is more pronounced among firms with greater female representation on boards and those are characterized by strong commitments to offering superior quality to customers and high integrity. The results of this study offer promising implications for both investors and firms located in areas where the gambling culture is deeply embedded in the social fabric.
Recent research has shown that increased sustainability disclosure is associated with greater use of corporate impression management. However, the specific benefits of these practices for firms remain unclear. This study empirically examines the effects of impression management strategies in environmental disclosure on the credit availability of climate-risk-exposed firms. The findings suggest that climate-risk-exposed firms gain improved access to credit by increasing the use of visual elements or reducing textual readability in lengthy climate disclosures. Increased use of visual elements helps create a favorable image of firms' responses to climate risks, whereas reduced textual readability helps obscure unfavorable climate performance. Empirical analyses based on environmental, social, and governance ratings support this mechanism. Further analysis shows that the effect of visual strategies in lengthy climate disclosures on credit availability is stronger among firms facing greater financing constraints and among those without violations.
In response to the global challenge of climate change, many countries are increasingly adopting policy instruments designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, with green taxes and institutional reforms serving as two central strategies. However, the relationship between these instruments and CO2 emissions remains inconclusive, particularly with respect to nonlinear effects and differences in policy effectiveness across countries. This study applies Bayesian quantile regression (BQR) and Bayesian linear regression (BLR) to explore both the individual and interactive impacts of environmental taxes (GTAX) and institutional quality (IQ) on per capita CO2 emissions. By using cross-national data that reflect a range of development levels and pollution intensities, the study examines these relationships across different quantiles of CO2 emissions. The results reveal that GTAX exhibits a nonlinear influence: It significantly reduces emissions at lower quantiles but has a weaker or even reversed effect at higher quantiles-suggesting that the effectiveness of green taxation is context-dependent. IQ consistently shows a negative effect on emissions, confirming its essential role in environmental governance. Importantly, the interaction term (GTAX & times; IQ) underscores a threshold effect: At lower quantiles (Q0.05-Q0.30), it has a positive coefficient with high probability, implying potential unintended consequences when taxes are imposed in low-pollution but institutionally strong settings. From Q0.35 onwards, however, the interaction effect turns significantly negative, indicating the combined reforms are more effective in highly polluted countries. Compared with BLR, the BQR model provides a more nuanced and accurate depiction of how policy impacts vary across the emission distribution. Based on these findings, we propose tailored policy implications for different groups of countries.
Software developers often spend a large part (40%-70%) of their time on non-core tasks-tasks that do not directly add new product functionalities but are essential for a product's basic viability. A growing ecosystem of external providers now gives these developers the option to delegate such tasks, freeing resources for reallocation toward innovation and market expansion. We study how the cost of non-core tasks, developers' ability to reallocate freed-up resources into new product functionalities, and product substitutability jointly determine when competing developers in a duopoly benefit from delegating non-core tasks in order to expand into a more advanced market. When developers compete on prices and make delegation decisions before provider pricing, both developers delegate when the reallocation efficiency and non-core task costs are sufficiently high and product substitutability is not too high; neither delegates when both non-core task costs and product substitutability are sufficiently low; otherwise, only one developer delegates. We also show that, counterintuitively, when one or both developers delegate, greater product substitutability or higher cost of non-core tasks may increase developers' profits. Extensions show how these strategic effects depend on price versus quantity competition between developers, the market structure of external providers, and the timing of provider pricing and developers' delegation decisions.
This paper investigates the impact of executives with academic backgrounds ("academic executives") on corporate green patents. We find that both the presence of academic executives and the proportion of academic executives have a significantly positive impact on firms' green patents, and this effect is positively associated with the firm's commitment to environmental ethics. The mechanisms analysis shows that academic executives promote corporate green innovation by improving companies' Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) performance and increasing the Research and Development (R&D) investment. Further analysis reveals that the effect of academic executives on corporate green patents primarily stems from executives with prior experience in research institutions. We also find that academic executives play a more important role in green patents in nonindustrial firms, larger firms, and those located in the Central and Western regions of China. Our findings contribute to the literature by offering new insights into corporate governance and environmental performance within the frameworks of Upper Echelons Theory and Imprinting Theory.
With continuous innovation in Internet technology, platform-based enterprises are rapidly emerging as key players across various industries. However, due to their high market position and information advantages, some of these enterprises may potentially establish exclusive agreements, posing damage to market competition fairness and consumer utilities. In this study, we build on a Hotelling model to develop a duopoly platform competition model that consists of consumers, platforms, and merchants. We focus on examining the impacts of the dominant platform imposing exclusive agreements on merchants and consumers. The findings indicate that merchant switching costs and cross-side network effects are crucial factors influencing platform pricing strategies. Based on these, in different scenarios, the platform will flexibly make the decision regarding increasing or decreasing the consumer service fee rate to achieve the goals of profit maintenance or market preemption. Furthermore, when the dominant platform utilizes a differentiated pricing strategy, the competing platform can adjust its pricing strategy accordingly to maintain profitability. However, if the dominant platform implements a traffic control strategy, the competing platform is unable to offset the decrease in market size through price adjustments, resulting in a loss of profits. Last, we identify that platform-exclusive agreements always have a negative impact on consumer utilities. Moreover, when merchant transfer costs are high, compared with the differentiated pricing strategy, the dominant platform's implementation of traffic control strategies will seriously damage the merchant utilities.
