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Building Information Modeling (BIM) competitions are a beneficial approach to enhance BIM education, offering students practical experience in BIM application, including mastering workflows and technical tools. However, research exploring the individual perceptions influencing participation intentions and behaviors in BIM competitions is limited. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the factors affecting university students' behavioral intention and behavior in BIM competitions, providing theoretical support for BIM competitions and educational reform.

This study employs the Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) based on the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) framework to analyze the factors influencing BIM competition participation among 970 Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) university students.

The results of the study show that social influence, attitude, and self-efficacy play critical roles in shaping students' intentions to participate in BIM competitions. Furthermore, self-efficacy, facilitating conditions, and behavioral intention significantly influence students' actual engagement in such competitions. Surprisingly, effort expectancy negatively influences intentions, as less challenging tasks can lead students to perceive their participation as less impactful on their skills and learning, reducing their behavioral intention to participate.

This research provides valuable insights into the effectiveness of BIM competitions in enhancing BIM education for AEC students. Extending the UTAUT model to include self-efficacy and attitude, provides a novel perspective for understanding students' intentions and behaviors regarding BIM competitions. The study’s theoretical support proposes incorporating BIM competitions to augment BIM teaching methods and offers suggestions for advancing the efficacy of students' involvement in BIM competitions within higher education, thus contributing to educational reform in the AEC sector.

This study aims to analyze the development of digital market characteristics particularly focusing on how the strategic choices of platforms are not fully reflected in pricing. In addition, the implications for the development of theories of harm are investigated to explore the necessity of a relevant market definition in assessing infringement and evaluating the adequacy of Indonesian competition law.

This study is a legal analysis that uses statutory approaches, cases, comparative law and the development of theories of harm in digital mergers. The case approach is conducted by analyzing three cases decided by the Indonesia Business Competition Supervisory Commission. This approach provides insight into the response of Komisi Pengawas Persaingan Usaha concerning the merger and acquisition cases in the digital era as well as the provision of different analyses in conventional markets. However, competition can be potentially damaged in digital markets and a comparative law approach is taken by analyzing digital merger cases decided by authorities in other countries.

Results reveal that the digital market has created a “relevant market” that is challenging and blurred due to multi-sided network effects and consumer data usage characteristics. Platform-based enterprises’ prices fluctuate due to the digital market’s network effect and consumer data statistics. Smartphone prices depend on the number of apps and consumer data. Neoclassical theory focusing on product markets and location applied in Indonesia must be revised to establish a relevant digital economy market. To evaluate digital mergers, new harm theories are needed. The merger should also protect consumer data. Law Number 27 of 2022 on Personal Data Protection and Government Regulation on the Implementation of Electronic Systems and Transactions protects online consumers, a basic step in due diligence for digital mergers. The Indonesian Government should promptly strengthen the notion of “relevant markets” in the digital economy, which could lead to fair business competition violations like big data control. Notify partners or digital merger participants of the accessibility of sensitive data like transaction history and user location.

The development of digital market characteristics has implications for developing theories of harm in digital markets. Indonesian competition law needs to develop such theories of harm to analyze the potential for anticompetitive digital mergers in the digital economy era.

The study aims to analyze factors impacting firms’ success and persistence in a digital platform competition using the structure-conduct-performance (SCP) framework. The study also includes real-life cases that are beneficial to academicians and practitioners to understand and develop strategies for success and persistence during uncertainty.

A literature review to identify the factors that impact success and persistence in a digital platform competition was conducted following Webster and Watson (2002). Findings were integrated into a SCP framework to examine and understand the identified factors’ relational impact.

While analyzing factors under the SCP framework, all factors were divided into three categories: those impacting positively, those impacting negatively and those with ambiguous impact on the success and persistence in digital platform competition. Digital platform firms can exploit the positively impacting factors to increase market share by being distinctive from other digital platform firms and becoming dominant by withstanding competition. On the other hand, negatively impacting factors increase barriers to entry, intensify competition and reduce the distinctiveness of digital platform firms. Lastly, a few factors may have either a positive or a negative impact depending upon the particular characteristics of the firm/industry.

The study opens the scope for future research on empirically testing the developed conceptual framework and relationships by developing propositions to posit the possible impact of these factors on digital platforms’ success and persistence.

The study contributed to the existing literature by using SCP framework to analyze the factors affecting firm’s success and persistence in a digital platform competition. Also, the study has discussed the relational impact of factors rather than their impact in isolation.

The study seeks to evaluate the effect of capital adequacy and competition on the liquidity creation of Kenyan commercial banks.

Unbalanced panel data from 36 Kenyan commercial banks with licenses from 2001 to 2020 is used in the study. The generalized method of moments (GMM), a two-step system, is employed in the investigation. To increase the robustness and prevent erroneous findings, serial correlation tests and instrumental validity analyses are used. The methodology developed by Berger and Bouwman (2009) is used to estimate the commercial banks' levels of liquidity creation.

The study supports the financial fragility-crowding out hypothesis by finding a significant negative effect of capital adequacy on the liquidity creation of commercial banks. The research also identifies a significant inverse relationship between competition and liquidity creation, depicting competition's value-destroying effect.

A trade-off exists between capital adequacy and liquidity creation, which must be carefully evaluated as changes in capital requirements are considered. The value-destroying effect of competition on liquidity creation presents a case for policy geared toward consolidating banks' operations through possible mergers and acquisitions.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first study to empirically offer evidence concurrently on the effect of competition and capital adequacy on the liquidity creation of commercial banks in a developing economy such as Kenya. Additionally, the authors employ a novel measure of competition at the firm level.

Several empirical studies indicate that the existence of a large informal sector is a major obstacle to firms’ choices of innovation strategies. This paper aims to address this issue and investigates the effect of the informal sector on the innovation of formal firms in Greece.

Using the World Bank’s Enterprise Survey data, the impact of informal competition on formal firms’ innovation in Greece is investigated by testing whether formal firms use innovation as a tool to protect and sustain their competitive advantage vis-à-vis informal firms and whether overall and informal competition has an inverted-U relationship with the innovation of formal firms. The effects of bribing and other variables drawn from the empirical literature are also controlled for.

The findings fill a gap in the literature regarding the effects of the informal sector on formal economic activity in Greece, by indicating that the informal sector puts pressure on formal firms to innovate, in order to differentiate their product or service and enhance their productivity and by offering learnings to help policymakers to promote innovation in Greece.

The originality of this study is that it investigates the impact of informal competition on formal firms’ innovation in Greece, a developed economy with a large informal sector. It does so by focusing on the effects that formal firms’ informal practices have on their competitors’ innovation activities, and the role of informal competition in creating and sustaining a competitive advantage in Greece.

Container liner shipping companies started expanding their business by investing in container port terminals in the late 1990s. This market entry results in an extensive presence of vertically integrated liners and terminals. This study aims to explore the competition effects of this vertical integration trend based on a regional (European) analysis. In particular, it extracts lessons from the European Commission (EC) cases on the competition effects of vertical integration. The critical analysis of the cases examined at the institutional level intends to reach conclusions on whether liner–terminal vertical integration harmed or advanced competition in the relevant markets and/or the extent that there is a need to revise the current policy practices.

This study critically assesses the EC’s decisional practices in port container terminal vertical mergers in the last 25 years (1997–2021). Based on a literature review comparing maritime and competition economists' perspectives, it reviews the types of mergers examined, the methodology followed for relevant market definition and calculation of market shares and the estimated competition effects. The Hamburg–Le Havre area is the port range used as a case study for comparing the decisional practice with actual market developments. These container ports serve the greatest consuming market of final and intermediate goods in Europe and are gateways to Central and Eastern Europe.

The assessment identifies a need for expanding the investigation as a precondition for reaching conclusions on both the anti- and pro-competitive effects. First, only a limited number of transactions have been notified to the EC. Second, the empirical research identified a gap in this process, as there were no decisions (phase I) on vertical mergers between 2008 and 2016. Third, the exante assessment has not applied a phase II in-depth analysis to any case due to the absence of competition concerns. Finally, due to the absence of complaints, there is a lack of any ex post assessment of the effects of vertical integration.

This assessment is important for understanding the current and emerging features of intra-port and inter-port competition and the potential effects that the continuation and expansion of liner companies' vertical integration strategies will have along maritime supply chains. It also contributes to the broader discussion on liner companies' strategies, such as the research and policy-making efforts around the globe to understand the impact of both vertical and horizontal integration.

These discussions are critical for a diversity of businesses that use liner shipping services or provide facilities and services to container shipping lines or ports. They are important for the interests of customers and consumers as they could inform any needed re-visiting of competition policy to protect from the dominance of any market developments that would lead to conditions limiting competition. Expanding analysis on the competition effects of non-notified mergers would help a better understanding of market changes.

Enhancing competition and limiting monopolies is valuable from a consumer's perspective. This is more so in the case of maritime trade that serves the needs of societies. The study contributes by generating a better understanding of how decision-makers have worked towards that direction and what realignments are worthy.

There are no previous comprehensive reviews and analyses of the ways that policy-makers at the regional level have addressed the competition effects of vertical integration strategies of liner shipping companies when enhancing competition is valuable from a consumer perspective. Comparing maritime economists and competition, the study, via its literature review, also offers a comparison of maritime and competition perspectives on these competition effects, allowing positioning of how effective decisional-making practices have been.

The present study assesses the commercial bank profit efficiency and its relationship to banking sector competition in a rapidly growing emerging economy, India from 2009 to 2019 using stochastic frontier analysis (SFA).

Lerner indices, conventional and efficiency-adjusted, quantify competition. Two SFA models are employed to calculate alternative profit efficiency (inefficiency) scores: the two-step time-decay approach proposed by Battese and Coelli (1992) and the recently developed single-step pairwise difference estimator (PDE) by Belotti and Ilardi (2018). In the first step of the BC92 framework, profit inefficiency is calculated, and in the second step, Tobit and Fractional Regression Model (FRM) are utilized to evaluate profit inefficiency correlates. PDE concurrently solves the frontier and inefficiency equations using the maximum likelihood process.

The results suggest that foreign banks are less profit efficient than domestic equivalents, supporting the “home-field advantage” hypothesis in India. Further, increasing competition drives bank managers to make riskier lending and investment choices, decreasing bank profit efficiency. However, this effect varies depending on bank ownership and size.

Literature on the competition bank efficiency link is conspicuously scant, with a focus on technical and cost efficiency. Less is known regarding the influence of competition on bank profit efficiency. The article is one of the first to examine commercial bank profit efficiency and its relationship to banking sector competition. Additionally, the study work represents one of the first applications of the FRM presented by Papke and Wooldridge (1996) and the PDE provided by Belotti and Ilardi (2018).

This chapter presents the findings of an extracurricular online beta test of a competition between students of the University of Wales Trinity Saint David and the International University of Malaya-Wales. The competition is intended to promote the concept of harmonious entrepreneurship and the creation of student-led harmonious enterprises that address the global sustainability challenge and deliver a triple bottom line in which profit, people, and planet are in harmony. It reveals that extracurricular learning can attract students from disciplines other than business and can educate the participants, both staff and students, not just about harmonious entrepreneurship but also how to identify and launch an innovative harmonious enterprise that addresses a sustainability challenge. The test identifies how the competition may be improved prior to its global launch and makes recommendations for students, educators, mentors, providers, and universities as to how it might best be implemented. Once revised and launched the competition will be further tested to better understand how extracurricular learning can help advance the delivery of both entrepreneurship and sustainability education in universities and colleges around the globe.

Organizations desire more accurate cost systems as competition increases, and consequently increase cost system complexity, as cost systems with greater complexity are potentially more accurate than simpler systems. However, even complex systems are prone to impactful inaccuracies, for example, due to design or calculation issues, that can adversely affect decision-making and firm performance. The authors investigate whether and the extent to which cost system complexity and competition decrease managers’ attribution of cost-system-driven adverse firm effects to the cost system. The authors find greater cost system complexity (by inspiring greater confidence in the cost system) and higher competition (by providing a plausible external cause) decrease managers’ attribution of cost-system-driven adverse firm effects to the cost system. With both greater cost system complexity and higher competition, managers observing signals of material cost inaccuracies are potentially the least likely to attribute cost-system-driven adverse firm effects to the cost system.

The European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) calls for far-reaching changes to the way economic activity will occur in EU digital markets. Before its remedies are imposed, it is critical to assess their impacts on individual markets, the digital sector, and the overall European economy. The European Commission (EC) released an Impact Assessment in support of the DMA that purports to evaluate it using cost/benefit analysis.

An economic evaluation of the DMA should consider its full impacts on dynamic competition. The Impact Assessment neither assesses the DMA's impact on dynamic competition in the digital economy nor evaluates the impacts of specific DMA prohibitions and obligations. Instead, it considers benefits in general and largely ignores costs. We study its benefit assessments and find they are based on highly inappropriate methodologies and assumptions. A cost/benefit study using inappropriate methodologies and largely ignoring costs cannot provide a sound policy assessment.

Instead of promoting dynamic competition between platforms, the DMA will likely reinforce existing market structures, ossify market boundaries, and stunt European innovation. The DMA is likely to chill R&D by encouraging free riding on the investments of others, which discourages making those investments. Avoiding harm to innovation is critical because innovation delivers large, positive spillover benefits, driving increases in productivity, employment, wages, and prosperity.

The DMA prioritizes static over dynamic competition, with the potential to harm the European economy. Given this, the Impact Assessment does not demonstrate that the DMA will be beneficial overall, and its implementation must be carefully tailored to alleviate or lessen its potential to harm Europe’s economic performance.