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“Competition intensity” is a factor in addressing competitiveness. The understanding on competition intensity is prerequisite to the formulation of industrial competition policies as well as firms’ competition strategies. In the construction context, whereas competition intensity can be measured using a number of traditional approaches (e.g. competitor number, concentration), the measurement is often criticized for poor efficiency. The purpose of this paper is to propose a new model for measuring competition intensity in light of the theory of discriminant analysis.

The proposed model is composed of predictor variables concerned with market operation as well as criterion variables that classify markets into a few predefined groups based on the values of competition intensity. Empirical data of China's local construction markets were collected to verify the proposed model.

The research findings indicate that the model can offset the drawbacks of traditional measures in the construction market.

It is recommended using the proposed model to predict the competition trend of construction market especially when data for the traditional approaches are poor or not readily available.

The proposed model is a development of the literature in examining competition intensity.

Drawing upon the social exchange theory, this study examines the interplay of transactive memory system (TMS) with improvisation and market competition intensity for the impact on entrepreneurship performance.

This study used the temporal separation technique and used a questionnaire survey to collect data with a final sample of 423 valid responses forming 74 entrepreneurial teams from firms across 6 cities in China.

The expertise and credibility of the TMS has a significant positive impact on entrepreneurial performance and improvisation which mediates the relationship between the expertise and credibility of the TMS and entrepreneurial performance. The intensity of market competition positively moderates the mediating role of improvisation between the expertise and credibility of the TMS and entrepreneurial performance.

This study contributes to the literature on entrepreneurship in emerging economies and entrepreneurial teams. Literature on TMS lacks studies on entrepreneurship performance. The authors' contextualized TMS perspective examines the impact of specific behavior of improvisation and, therefore, holds the promise to offer a novel angle to investigate how exactly TMS impacts entrepreneurship performance while engaging in micro-level processes and entrepreneurial phenomena such as surprises and response to surprises through improvisation. The study adds the context of social exchange theory to performance of entrepreneurial teams.

Product market competition may have various impacts on audit fees. On the one hand, according to the agency theory, product market competition can mitigate agency problems between management and shareholders. For clients with higher product market competition, auditors will lower the level of engagement risk assessment and reduce the required level of audit evidence, and hence audit fees will be lower. On the other hand, according to the audit risk model, product market competition will increase client business risk and audit engagement risk. Moreover, for clients with competition advantage, client business risk and audit engagement risk will be lower, and hence a lower audit fee. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

In this paper, the authors collect financial accounting data and audit fee data from CSMAR database. Our sample selection starts with all available observations on the Chinese listed companies during 2006–2011. Since there is a big difference in accounting practices between financial companies and other industries, the authors delete observations on financial companies. The authors further remove observations with missing data, yielding 6,709 observations for the final analysis. To define the industry, the authors use the first two digits of standard industry classification code set by China Securities Regulatory Commission. In order to reduce the effect of extreme observations, the authors also truncate the data at 1 and 99 percent. The authors use the Herfindahl–Hirschman index (HHI) and the natural logarithm of the number of listed companies within the industry to measure product market competition intensity. HHI is calculated as the sum of the squared percentage of revenues of the client firm among the total revenues of all public companies, i.e. HHI = ∑ i = 1 N ( s i / S ) 2 . N is the number of listed companies in the industry, S_i is the revenues for an individual firm and S is the total revenues of all public companies within the same industry. A higher HHI score indicates fewer companies dominate the industry and hence lower intensity of competition in the product market. The second measure of industry competition intensity is LNN, the natural logarithm of the total number of public companies in the same industry of a client firm. A larger value of LNN indicates a larger number of competitors in the industry, and a higher level of competition intensity. Following the literature (Kale and Loon, 2011), the authors use Lerner index (or price-cost margin (PCM)) to measure the listed company’s competitive advantage. It is actually a measure of a firm’s power to influence product prices in the industry. The authors adopt the Peress (2010) method to estimate Lerner index as net operating income, divided by sales, i.e. PCM=(Sales–COGS–Selling expenses–Administrative expenses)/Sales. A higher value of PCM indicates more product pricing power and a higher competitive advantage of a company. The authors also use Lerner index ranking (R_PCM) to measure the competitive advantage of a company in the industry. The authors sort PCM values in ascending order in each industry and divide into ten groups. Then, the authors assign a value from one to ten to each listed company within each group in each industry. A higher R_PCM value represents higher market power and higher competitive advantage of a company. Based on Simunic (1980) framework, the authors develop the following model to test the relationship between product market competition, competition advantage and audit fees: LNAF_it=β₀+β₁ PMC_it+β₂ SIZE_it+β₃ INV_it+β₄ REC_it+β₅ GROWTH_it+β₆ PRELOSS_it+β₇ LEV_it+β₈ QUICK_it+β₉ OPIN_it+β₁₀ IBIG4_it+β₁₁ DBIG10_it+β₁₂ SWITCH_it+β₁₃ LOCATE_it+β₁₄ STATE_it+∑β YearDummies+ε_it.

Using a sample of 6,709 firm-year observations from the Chinese stock market for the period of 2007–2011, the authors find that the product market competition intensity has a negative impact on audit fees, which means that agency cost effect is dominant in audit pricing at industry level. In addition, a company’s competitive advantage in the industry has a significant and negative impact on audit fees, which means that business risk effect also plays a critical role in audit pricing of individual engagement. The findings indicate that, in determining audit fees, auditors in the emerging market of China consider both the competition intensity of their clients’ product market at the industry level and the competitive advantage of the specific clients within the industry.

The findings indicate that, in determining audit fees, auditors in the emerging market of China consider both the competition intensity of their clients’ product market at the industry level and the competitive advantage of the specific clients within the industry.

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.

As Lindsay (1994, 1995) encourages validation of existing results, this research replicates Guilding and McManus (2002) in a New Zealand (NZ) context. The usage and perceived merit of customer accounting practices were lower in NZ than in the Australian study. Few of the regressions where customer accounting usage and perceived merit were dependent variables revealed a statistically significant role for competition intensity and market orientation. There was some minor support for the perceived merit of customer accounting being higher in companies experiencing medium levels of competition intensity.

Technical progress is an important technique within improving China’s comparative advantages, as new and renewable technologies will be beneficial for energy security. Productive technical progress and green technical innovation are necessary to improve working conditions and productivity of industries. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to study technical progress in China under such harsh competitive circumstances, as well as types of technical progress that can be promoted, productive technical progress or green technology progress, and how technical progress will affect China’s competitive advantages.

The authors perform a multi-index multi-factor constitutive model based on a sample of 468 Chinese industries, and divide the industries into four categories.

The results indicate that there is a “U”-shape relationship between green technology progress and comparative advantages and an inverted “U”-shape relationship between the intensity of market competition and comparative advantages.

China has crossed the inflection point of the “U”-shaped curve. This, coupled with the slowing of economic growth, demonstrates the need for advocating green technology in China to decrease the pollutant discharge. Establishing Chinese national brands within overseas markets and earning a profit through the downstream of production chain enhance China’s international competitiveness.

One of the most original findings of this paper points out that China is faced with a situation in which exports are severely decreased and domestic environment pollution is increased. Vigorous promotion of green technology progress, improvement of the quality and the technical content of exported products, the establishment of national brand within the overseas market, as well as enhancement of China’s international competitiveness, is needed.

This paper aims to examine the relationships among supplier management practices, organizational context and supplier performance. The contexts selected for supplier management practices are economics transactional practices and high involvement work practices (HIWP); while power asymmetry and competition intensity are considered within the organizational context.

A questionnaire survey was conducted on a multinational semiconductor company. A two‐phase statistical analysis, which comprised phase one (reliability and factor analysis), and phase two (hierarchical multiple regression analysis), was used to analyze the data.

The study provides empirical evidence to support the conceptual and prescriptive statements in the literature regarding the impact of supplier management practices and the dynamics between organizational context and supplier management towards supplier performance. The results show that high involvement work practices (HIWP) mediate the impact of competition intensity on suppliers' quality performance and partially mediate the effect of competition intensity on suppliers' flexibility. The limitation of this study is that it does not use longitudinal data, which would be more useful to examine changes in variables that affect performance; nevertheless, as this study was conducted in‐house, it was able to control the extraneous factors.

The study provides important insights for managers to understand the disposition of the firm to better leverage organizational context by exploiting relationships with suppliers. The paper has extended organizational theory and marketing theory into a supply chain context. Moreover, it is among the first empirical work that specifically investigates the relationship between organizational context and supplier management practices; thus the paper fills an important gap in the supply chain literature.

The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of production capabilities, competition intensity and marketing and sales capabilities on the export and production performances of textile companies engaged in export-oriented production return to normal life from the pandemic.

Within the scope of the research, a sample of 683 white-collar expert participants was taken and a scale consisting of 29 statements in total was presented to them. The structural equation modeling (SEM) model was analyzed with the study SmartPLS. At the first stage, the relations between the scale expressions and the variables were given with factor loads and weights, validity/reliability analyzes were made for the model, and finally, the research model was tested.

As a result of the analysis in the research, it can be explained that the production capabilities and marketing and sales capabilities are important for the performance of the companies, at the same time the intensity of competition keeps the companies in a dynamic structure and the intensity of competition is also important for the companies to develop themselves.

Considering the limitations of the research, data were collected from white-collar employees working in export-oriented textile companies in Istanbul. Because in order to answer the questions about the variables representing the research model, expert and authorized employees were required.

It can be explained that the performance of companies in the production sector is positively affected if they discover opportunities in risky environments so that they can gain an advantageous position over their competitors in an intense competitive environment. Because it can be assumed as a result of the analysis that textile companies want to evaluate the opportunities in the competitive environment by using their production, marketing and sales abilities during the pandemic process.

The research is unique in that it sets an example for future studies by examining the effects of production capabilities, competitive intensity and marketing and sales capabilities, which are likely to affect the performance of textile companies in the return of normal life from pandemic conditions.

In the hybrid electricity market consisting of renewable and conventional energy, the generation output of renewable power is uncertain because of its intermittency, and the power market demand is also fluctuant. Meanwhile, there is fierce competition among power producers in the power supply market and retailers in the demand market after deregulation, which increases the difficulty of renewable energy power grid-connection. To promote grid-connection of renewable energy power in the hybrid electricity market, the authors construct different contract decision-making models in the “many-to-many” hybrid power supply chain to explore the pricing strategy of renewable energy power grid-connecting.

Considering the dual-uncertainty of renewable energy power output and electricity market demand, the authors construct different decision-making models of wholesale price contract and revenue-sharing contract to compare and optimize grid-connecting pricing, respectively, to maximize the profits of different participants in the hybrid power supply chain. Besides, the authors set different parameters in the models to explore the influence of competition intensity, government subsidies, etc. on power pricing. Then, a numerical simulation is carried out, they verify the existence of the equilibrium solutions satisfying the supply chain coordination, compare the differences of pricing contracts and further analyze the variation characteristics of optimal contract parameters and their interaction relations.

Revenue-sharing contract can increase the quantity of green power grid-connection and realize benefits Pareto improvement of all parties in hybrid power supply chain. The competition intensity both of power supply and demand market will have an impact on the sharing ratio, and the increase of competition intensity results in a reduction of power supply chain coordination pressure. The power contract price, spot price and selling price have all been reduced with the increase of the sharing ratio, and the price of renewable power is more sensitive to the ratio change. The sharing ratio shows a downward trend with the increase of government green power subsidies.

On the basis of expanding the definition of hybrid power market and the theory of newsvendor model, considering the dual-uncertainty of green power generation output and electricity market demand, this paper builds and compares different contract decision-making models to study the grid-connection pricing strategy of renewable energy power. And as an extension of supply chain structure types and management, the authors build a “many-to-many” power supply chain structure model and analyze the impact of competition intensity among power enterprises and the government subsidy on the power grid-connecting pricing.

This chapter investigates how market competition relates to firm corporate social responsibility (CSR) investment strategy. Using separate measures to capture different dimensions of competition, we find that firms are likely to invest more (less) in socially responsible initiatives when competition from existing rivals (potential entrants) is high. We also find that industry leaders are more likely to engage in more CSR when higher levels of competition exist, while followers primarily choose to strengthen other aspects of their competitiveness instead. Finally, analyzing the impact of CEO overconfidence on CSR engagement, our study finds novel evidence suggesting that firms with overconfident CEOs tend to underestimate the intensity of competition and are less sensitive to the impact of market competition on CSR engagement, relative to rational CEOs.