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This paper aims to clear whether the monopoly structure of the internet industry has produced market power and discussed the welfare change of the internet industry monopoly.

By using new empirical industrial organization methods and taking the e-commerce market as an example, the authors measured market power and economies of scale of the internet platform companies.

Internet platform enterprises have formed scale economy, but it has not had market power, and the industry still maintains high levels of competition; also, the emergence of large enterprises may increase the welfare of consumers.

The conclusion of this paper clarified actual competition status of internet industry and provided a new foothold for regulation and ideas for the traditional industry to crack the Marshall Conflict.

This paper investigates the relationship between product market competition and firms’ water information disclosure and how firms’ ownership type can affect this relationship in China, offering new insights into corporate water management.

The authors investigated 303 Chinese listed companies in highly water-sensitive industries to examine how product market competition influences corporate water information disclosure by subdividing the product market competition into market competition at the firm level and the industry competition intensity at the industry level.

The results show that there exists an inverted U-shaped relationship between industry competition and water information disclosure; enterprises with the highest market power in a mildly competitive industry are more willing to voluntarily disclose water information and play an industry benchmarking role. Further tests demonstrate that the relationship between industry competition intensity and water information disclosure is stronger for state-owned enterprises than for private enterprises.

The current water resources regulations in China are relatively lax and the water risk awareness of firms is weak, which may affect the applicability of the results. In addition, water information disclosure research is a relatively new field and a quantitative index system for water information disclosure is still in the exploratory stage. Further developments, including the selection, definition and measuring methods of a water index are required.

The authors developed a new direction of enterprise water management activities from the perspective of market competition. Based on the market conditions in China, the authors also investigated the impact of the ownership type of the enterprises on the relationship between market competition and water information disclosure.

The authors suggested that the government should improve laws and regulations and adopt incentive mechanisms to encourage enterprises to implement water resource management. In addition, the government should encourage high market status enterprises to actively fulfill their environmental responsibilities so that the entire industry is encouraged to follow suit.

This study represents an important development in the field of environmental accounting and is the first research on corporate water information disclosure; it also extends the research on the influence mechanisms of market competition on the environmental management practices of enterprises.

Examines the sequencing of economic reforms in the post‐communist transition, focusing on Russia. Proposes a moderately expansionary stabilization, succeeded by gradual liberalization and marketization, followed by a more ambitious economic restructuring and privatization.

This paper examines how medical practice, like all other productive activities, has been subject to the transformative elements of the forces and the relations of production involving class struggle and intra-class conflict. It will explore changes in the relations of production of medical practice which have been catalyzed by powerful productive forces. The current period of medical production involves the transformation of simple commodity production into a transitional stage of capitalist production with the seemingly unbounded growth of the medical productive forces. This development was precipitated by the intervention of capital as a whole, to restrict the drain on their variable capital through the placement of units of financial capital into the management of medical production, using the leverage of access to patients. In response, physicians have consolidated and centralized their practices to create enterprises with market power to limit the extraction of surplus by financial capital, and by their own employment of productive labor to extract surplus from hired physician labor and other clinical workers. Rationalization of the production of medical service commodities, and the sharing of surplus generated from exploitation of an expanded labor force by managed care financial capital and their capitalist partners owning medical enterprises, constitutes the contemporary relations of production. The contradictions of this mode of medical production and the potential for its reproduction will be analyzed.

Briefly outlines the background to the 1999 Review. Attempts to explore some of the regulatory options for the future legal framework at EU level. Examines the regulatory goals, instruments and scope of applicability of the future sector. Pinpoints some of the specific regulatory issues to be addressed with regard to mobile communications.

Market transition theory has specified general mechanisms to explain change in the balance of power between political and economic actors in transition economies. These mechanisms drive the endogenous construction of informal institutions of a market society; moreover, it is within the context of an ongoing change in relative power that the formal institutions of the emerging market economy arise. The theory makes clear predictions on the declining value of political capital as a consequence of progressive marketization, which incrementally results in transformative change in the direction of more relative autonomy between the political and economic spheres, not dissimilar from established market economies (Kornai, 1995; Evans, 1995; Nee, 2000; Lindenberg, 2000; Ricketts, 2000). In sum, the predicted change in relative power between redistributors and producers explains not only bottom-up entrepreneurial activity, but also the emergence of a market economy in departures from state socialism.

From the perspective of cause and effect, the operational processes of property insurance companies can be considered as historical events. The purpose of this study is to measure the operating efficiency of China's property insurance industry, explore the determinants that affect technical efficiency and outline the path to achieving high-quality development.

We chose 44 Chinese property insurance companies as research objects. The data were obtained from the Chinese Insurance Yearbook and China Statistical Yearbook 2015–2017. First, the data envelopment analysis (DEA) method was used to calculate the technical efficiency of property insurance companies. Then, Tobit regression and quantile regression were adopted to explore the influencing factors of technical efficiency. Finally, the fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) method was employed to summarize the path to improving the operating efficiency of property insurance companies.

The empirical results in the first stage suggested that the operation efficiency of China's property insurance industry was technically inefficient, and the scale efficiency was relatively better than the pure technical efficiency. In the second stage, we observed that the drivers for firm size, reinsurance rate, claim ratio and equity restriction were important determinants of an insurance firm's efficiency.

We also put forward four applicable, targeted and proven ways to improve the technical efficiency of property insurance companies. These configurations are verified by cases of existing property insurance companies, which can provide practical references for the insurance industry.

Our research enriches the insurance literature and efficiency methods, particularly regarding the specific paths of improving the technical efficiency. The relationship between elements and results is analyzed from a systematic perspective, and the research results are not only more consistent with what logic might imply but also more instructive for the improvement of reality.

There is a distinct separation of price discovery from pricing power in China's sugar spot and futures markets. The purpose of this paper is to identify the reasons and provide plausible explanations for this stylized phenomenon. Therefore, the research may deepen the understandings of the operational mechanisms and internal efficiency of China's sugar spot and futures markets.

The authors analyze the historical spot and futures price time series from China's sugar spot market and China's Zhengzhou Commodity Exchange (CZCE) within a co‐integration framework.

It is found that China's sugar spot market has the pricing power, even though the futures market leads the spot market in price discovery. The phenomenon of observed separation of price discovery in spot market from pricing power in futures market may be caused by: irrational speculation in CZCE sugar futures market; oligopoly and local government politics; or the operational efficiency of the wholesale spot market, especially for its comparative advantages of information accessibility in the sugar producing areas. The results are compared with other empirical findings in many other commodities markets to obtain deeper understandings.

The paper uncovers and provides the earliest econometric evidence of the observed stylized phenomenon and also provides plausible explanations for this phenomenon.

As the cost of completing a transaction, the green merger and acquisition (M&A) premium paid on mergers can influence whether the acquisition creates value or not. However, studies linking M&A premiums to firm value have had mixed results, even fewer studies have examined the effect of green M&A premiums on bidders’ firm value. The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether and how green M&A premiums affect firm value in the context of China’s heavy polluters.

Using 323 deals between 2008 and 2019 among China’s heavy polluters, this paper estimates with correlation analysis and multiple regression analysis.

Green M&A premiums are negatively associated with firm value. The results are more significant when firms adopt symbolic rather than substantive corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategies. Robustness and endogeneity tests corroborate the findings. The negative relation is stronger when acquiring firms have low governmental subsidy and environmental regulation, when firms have overconfident management, when firms are state-owned and when green M&A occurs locally or among provinces in the same region. This study also analyzes agency cost as an intermediary in the relationship between green M&A premium and firm value, which lends support to the agency-view hypothesis.

This study provides systemic evidence that green M&A premiums damage firm value through agency cost channel and the choice of CSR strategies from the perspective of acquirers. These findings enrich the literature on both the economic consequences of green M&A premiums and the determinants of firm value and provide a plausible explanation for mixed findings on the relationship between green M&A premiums and firm value.

The purpose of this article is to present a model that compares the switching costs that consumers face when they buy pioneering and follower products.

A study of 255 new products indicates that switching costs are actually higher when switching from an existing product to a pioneering product.

The study shows that people who buy a pioneering product may also face switching costs, if the pioneering product is launched in an existing category where consumers are already familiar with similar products.

The results help to reinforce the view that first movers have advantages and demonstrate that switching costs do not lead to a higher level of consumer retention.

This study provides interesting managerial implications on how to launch new products more effectively when they suffer from switching costs..

Researchers commonly view switching costs as a barrier to market entry that protects enterprises that launch pioneering products and gives them a competitive advantage over those that launch follower products. The underlying idea is that people only experience switching costs when they change to a different follower product, rather than when they purchase a pioneering product instead of the product that they usually purchase.