Competitive Structure Research Articles

The K League and the Duality of Glocality: Men’s Professional Football in South Korea, 1983–2017

What happens when modern sports systems in noncore sports nations have undergone extended globalization? In this article, I draw on glocalization theory, particularly Roland Robertson and Richard Giulianotti’s “duality of glocality” to explore the historical developments of the K League, South Korea’s men’s professional football league, launched in 1983. There are many reasons the K League has not yet firmly established its status: (a) the league imposed continuous rule changes on foreign field players while banning foreign goalkeepers, (b) the league introduced a distinct competition structure partially adopted from its Western counterparts, (c) a supporter culture was established which has a similar outlook to that of other supporter cultures but it had a different internal structure, and (d) the league produced media content reflecting local viewer needs while maintaining a structure similar to Western media formats. The notion of a two-step glocalization, the process of heterogenization followed by homogenization with other cultures based on the things that were already heterogenized for a lengthy period, is used to advance the debate on glocalization and to better understand the reasons for the failure to attract K League spectators since its establishment in 1983.

Vertical Relationships with Hidden Interactions

In an agency model with adverse selection, we study how hidden interactions between agents affect the optimal contract. The principal employs two agents who learn their task environments through their involvement. The principal cannot observe the task environments. It is important to note that hidden interactions, such as acts of sabotage or help between the agents, have the potential to alter each other’s task environments. Our analysis encompasses two distinct organizational structures: competition and cooperation. Without hidden interactions, the competitive structure is optimal because the cooperative structure only provides the agents with more flexibility to collusively misrepresent their task environments. With hidden interactions, however, the cooperative structure induces the agents to help each other to improve the task environments while removing sabotaging incentives at no cost once collusion is deterred. As a result, the cooperative structure can be optimal in such a case. We discuss the link between production technology and organizational structure, finding that complementarity in production favors cooperative structures.

Examining financial growth nexus of emerging European countries

PurposeBesides the extensive research on managerial efficiency in the financial sector worldwide, emerging economies in Europe remain untapped. This research scrutinises the impact of managerial performance and competitive structures on their financial industry growth in terms of services they offer and ability to liquefy stock in capital markets.Design/methodology/approachThis study contains data from selected emerging European countries' during the period of 2010–2020. This study uses data from the Heritage Foundation's Index of Economic Freedom to control for firm-level indicators. The fixed-effects (FE) method was used to explore the nexus between financial sector growth and management performance as well as competitive firm structure.FindingsThe findings provide evidence of the existing impact of firm indicators on the financial sector's growth. Two-step system the generalized method of moments (GMM) estimations are used for the robustness check of the authors' model. Whilst on a scavenger hunt through existing literature, the authors realise that there is an overwhelming lack of enthusiasm in this field.Originality/valueWith the intention of better assessment, the authors use regulatory contextual variables to look for any possible impacts and surprisingly discover a pattern in the financial growth nexus.

Competitive Latent Structures for the Comic Style Markers: Developing a Psychometrically Sound Short Version Using Spanish and US American Samples

The Comic Style Markers (CSM) is a questionnaire that allows a fine-grained description of how people differ in the way they display humor in their daily lives. It includes 48 statements capturing eight interrelated, yet distinct comic styles: fun, irony, wit, sarcasm, benevolent humor, satire, nonsense humor, and cynicism. Despite the independent conceptual roots of these humorous domains, the analysis of the CSM scales’ latent structure shows that their empirical distinction needs to be improved. Using the information derived from a competitive latent approach, including confirmatory factor analysis, bifactor analysis, and exploratory structural equation modeling, we proposed and validated a shorter 24-item version of the CSM in a large sample of 925 Spanish individuals (SP-CSM-24). This scale-refinement improved the psychometric differentiation of the eight comic styles without undermining the good internal consistency and the temporal stability of the CSM scores. Strong invariance was held for gender and age groups, and partial scalar invariance for countries also emerged using a sample of 318 U.S. American adults. Structural equation modeling also corroborated a convincing test-criterion validity for the SP-CSM-24, with dispositional expressions of benevolent humor (positively) and cynicism (negatively) outperforming other comic styles in accounting for individuals’ well-being.

Blessing or curse? Impact of incomplete information in a networked cournot competition

Networked markets are prevalently seen in different industries. Current research mainly focuses on settings with a transparent network. However, in many applications, firms choose their actions without fully knowing their competitors’ information. This study examines oligopolies in networked markets when firms’ production costs are incomplete information. We characterize the unique Bayesian equilibrium supply quantities for any given network under incomplete information. Our results connect the equilibrium outcome with the underlying competition and information structures. We find that when the production cost of a firm is high, incomplete information helps increase its total production quantity. In contrast, the impact is the opposite in the presence of low production costs. However, the impact of incomplete information on a firm’s supply allocation on each edge depends not only on its production cost but also on the network position of the edge. We also find that, unlike the case in single-market, the low-cost firm always suffers from incomplete information, while the high-cost firm benefits from incomplete information only under certain conditions. Moreover, we show that changes in global network structure that do not directly relate to a firm may alter its information preference. We study several extensions and find that not only do firms with cost advantage prefer complete information, but those high-cost firms with smaller cost disadvantages are also more likely to prefer a transparent competition environment. The case of heterogeneous logistic costs is also considered, and we show that for firms of high-cost type, the logistic cost advantage may hedge its benefit from incomplete information. Our findings imply that a firm has to consider not only its own cost type and local competition but also the global network structure to determine its preference for information structure. Moreover, our results may be helpful to the market regulator that, when promoting information transparency, firms with better production technology are more likely to support the movement.

Long-distance rail in Europe: Comparing the forms of head-on competition across Europe

Europe is finally entering a season of liberalisation in the long-distance rail passenger market, which takes the form of on-track competition among public and private operators. The paper provides a broad-scope comparison of relevant European markets, belonging to liberalised and non-liberalised countries, aiming to point out the patterns in terms of supply, competition model and prices. The paper is based on a sample of heterogeneous 69 city-pairs, analysed in two fourteen days periods in 2019 (May/June and November). All available modes are observed, collecting info on companies, frequency of services, and cheapest price. The analysis starts from a schematisation of different business models, based on literature. Then, using the database, we study the country's supply structure, size, and level of intermodal and intra-modal competition through HHIs. Prices are analysed in two steps: the average prices and the price dispersion, searching for their main determinants, including but not limited to competition. Results show that a higher competition level is not always corresponding to low prices, which are instead determined by many other factors such as size of market, demand, socio-economic characteristics, subsidies, production costs, speed advantage, strength of the incumbent, etc. The competition level, instead, directly influences the quality, the supplied capacity, and the price dispersion.

The Changing Nature of the Natural Gas Trade between Russia and Turkey: The Role of Climate Change and the EU Institutions

This article focuses on the changing nature of Russia-Turkey energy trade relations. The main argument of the article is that climate change, as well as EU institutions and environmental protection regulations, have been decisive in the long-term transformation of bilateral natural gas relations. The EU favors competitive market structures to combat climate change, and the EU Green Deal sets ambitious targets for renewable energy consumption. These variables establish grounds for legitimacy among EU members in the face of Russian dominance of the EU energy market. However, as discussed in this paper, the Russian government’s main strategy to counter this opposition from the EU side is to circumvent the EU’s institutional arrangements through its relations with Turkey. The final point to be discussed in this paper is the impact of the EU energy and environment policies on changes in Russian perceptions of Turkey.

Forced to innovate? Consequences of United States' anti-dumping sanctions on innovations of Chinese exporters

This study examines how trade protection, particularly anti-dumping sanctions on foreign exports, impacts innovations developed by affected foreign firms. Using data on anti-dumping sanctions levied by the United States (US) government on Chinese exports and on domestic patents associated with the sanctioned products developed by Chinese firms in China, our difference-in-differences estimates show that such anti-dumping sanctions imposed by the US on Chinese products significantly increased the total number of patented innovations produced by the firms exporting from China targeted by the sanctions. This effect is boosted during the pro-innovation national policy period launched by China in 2006. Moreover, we ascertain a critical scope condition that targeted exporting firms increase more-substantive innovations, rather than more-marginal ones, that likely increase the value-added of their products. Overall, these findings suggest that anti-dumping sanctions could lead to an unintended consequence of prompting targeted exporting firms to enhance their innovations in order to elevate the value-added of their products, thus enabling these firms to escape the price competition of lower value-added products and mitigate the risk of future anti-dumping sanctions. This outcome means that, in an effort to protect lower-end domestic manufacturers, protectionist policies could actually intensify the competition faced by higher-end domestic manufacturers via increasing the innovations of affected foreign firms. These outcomes might not only alter the structure of product-market competition, but also contribute to greater technological competition in the future.

The role of the left to the path to a minimum income policy in Italy

ABSTRACT In 2018, Italy became the last of the E.U. member states to introduce a minimum income policy. Our work helps explain why Italy was a laggard in this field by investigating the role the Italian left played, historically, in the evolution of policies to combat poverty. This is a surprisingly neglected topic. We argue that until the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Italian left focused on labour-market insiders – that is, full-time core workers – and appeared largely unconcerned about the most vulnerable individuals, the outsiders, thus accepting the lack of policies to combat poverty. The policy status quo, however, dovetailed with a lively debate among left-wing intellectuals and politicians. This debate paved the way for several attempts by left-wing governments in the 1990s to implement a national pilot scheme (called the Reddito Minimo di Inserimento [R.M.I.]) along with local minimum income policies. The electoral success in 2013 of a new populist movement, the Five-star Movement (M.5.s.), campaigning on the flagship project of the Reddito di Cittadinanza (R.d.C.), fuelled the political debate on anti-poverty policies. This electoral ‘threat’ finally convinced the centre-left government under Paolo Gentiloni to establish in 2018 the Reddito di Inclusione, the first minimum income scheme in Italy. Our work demonstrates the importance of political variables, such as the structure and dynamics of party competition, in the fight against poverty. It also highlights the role of the Italian left as a political innovator in this field.

Eğitim Yönetimi Konseptinde Süreçsel Eğitim Metotlarının İncelenmesi

Information and communication technologies enrich constructive and constructive educational environments. The learning experience by exploring in information environments offers more interaction and feedback opportunities than traditional educational methods. In educational processes, the content is divided into small information units for predetermined purposes, and even in order to learn a simple concept, the student has to turn all the parts into a whole. Moreover, every student is expected to learn the same information. Therefore, the same learning activities and evaluation criteria are used for each student. In the concept of educational management, there are some important differences between an innovative classroom environment and a traditional classroom environment in the context of Decisional educational methods. The traditional classroom has a teacher-centered structure based on transmitting predetermined information, using direct instruction, the course content is mostly taken from textbooks, students are passively watching the lesson, questioning information or exchanging mutual thoughts is not allowed much, students have a competitive structure that requires them to perform various learning activities individually. In modern educational methods, it is interested in how the learner creates his own knowledge. Here, the teacher is expected to establish a relationship between the units to be learned and create a system during the learning process of the learner along with the view that he cannot transmit information Decaying and in its entirety. Due to the necessity of presenting information in different ways, the different tools that are being used have been replaced by new information technologies that can process multiple forms of information expression in a single mechanism. The form of textbooks and other printed materials has been changed and transferred to electronic media, text-reading devices and voice communication mechanisms have been improved, making the user's interaction with electronic media easier and more natural. Key Words: Educational Management, Educational Methods, Non-formal Education, Vocational Education

Assessing the Effect of Internet Indicators on Agri-Food Export Competitiveness

The agricultural sector contributes to the national economy by engaging in export activities within the global market. Conversely, the rapid development of the Internet has greatly impacted output production and has introduced heightened competitiveness among various countries. This study aims to examine the impact of Internet-related indicators on the competitive standing of agri-food industries on a global scope. These indicators are represented by user engagement, infrastructure availability, and security. The panel regression analysis focused on 126 countries from 2010 to 2020. The findings reveal that Internet infrastructure and security positively affect the competitiveness of agri-food exports. However, the indicator related to Internet users exhibits a negative impact. There is a change in competitiveness structure from enhancing the Internet indicator to 50%. After simulation, we found that 80 countries have a positive value of RSCA. It is lower than the actual value of RSCA in 89 countries. This study concluded that developing countries still have better opportunities to increase their agri-food export competitiveness than developed countries.

The paradox of talent: How chance affects success in tennis tournaments

Individual sports competitions provide a natural setting for examining the relative importance of talent and luck/chance in achieving success. The belief that success is primarily due to individual abilities and hard work rather than external factors is particularly strong in this context. Thus, individual talent is regarded as the most important – if not the only – component in ensuring a successful career for athletes. In this study, we test this belief using tennis as a case study, due to its popularity and competition structure in direct-elimination tournaments. Our dataset covers the last decade before Covid-19 pandemics (2010–2019) of main international events in the ATP circuit and consists of tourney results and annual rankings for professional male players. After a preliminary data analysis, we introduce an agent-based model able to accurately simulate the tennis players’ dynamics along several seasons. We show that, once calibrated on the dataset, the model is able to reproduce the main stylized facts observed in real data, including the results of single tournaments and the development of players’ careers in the ATP community. The strength of our approach lies in its simplicity: it requires only one free parameter a to determine the importance of talent in scoring every single point: a=1 indicates the ideal scenario in which only talent matters, whereas a=0 represents the opposite limit case, in which the outcome of each point is entirely due to chance. We find the best agreement between real data and simulation results when talent weights substantially less than luck, i.e. when a is between 0.20 and 0.30. A further comparison between data and simulations, based on the analysis of the direct networks of all the matches, confirms the previous finding. A posteriori, we notice that this surprisingly important role of chance in tennis tournaments is not an exception. On the contrary, it can be explained by a more general paradoxical effect that characterizes highly competitive environments, particularly in individual sports. In other words, when the difference in talent between top players is minimal, chance becomes determinant. Our findings highlight the impact of the – too often underestimated – external factors on athletes’ performance in individual tournaments and their careers. Our results point out the unfairness of the “winner-takes-all” reward system that enhances the disparities between the first classified players and the others in major competitions.

The Importance of the Palm Oil Industry for Malaysian Entrepreneurs

Malaysia is focusing on the agricultural sector, especially the palm oil industry, for economic development and employment opportunities. It is recognized that agriculture offers huge potential for creating thriving businesses within Malaysia. With full and active support from the government, there are insured big opportunities for existing and “would-be” entrepreneurs. The palm oil industry also brings myriad benefits to small farmers because farms are part of the overall supply chain. However, reinvesting in agribusiness needs a pool of young, innovative, committed, and enthusiastic local entrepreneurs. There are also characteristics unique to agribusiness that must be considered. Specifically, there are five elements present that make it different from other types of businesses: the requirement of related skills and knowledge, uncertainty due to variations in production, its unique cultural background, the possibility of political intervention and involvement, and its highly competitive structure.

Shifts in competitive structures can drive variation in species' phenology.

For many species, a well documented response to anthropogenic climate change is a shift in various aspects of its life history, including its timing or phenology. Often, these phenological shifts are associated with changes in abiotic factors used as proxies for resource availability or other suitable conditions. Resource availability, however, can also be impacted by competition, but the impact of competition on phenology is less studied than abiotic drivers. We fit generalized additive models (GAMs) to a long-term experimental dataset on small mammals monitored in the southwestern United States and show that altered competitive landscapes can drive shifts in breeding timing and prevalence, and that, relative to a dominant competitor, other species exhibit less specific responses to environmental factors. These results suggest that plasticity of phenological responses, which is often described in the context of annual variation in abiotic factors, can occur in response to biotic context as well. Variation in phenological responses under different biotic conditions shown here further demonstrates that a more nuanced understanding of shifting biotic interactions is useful to better understand and predict biodiversity patterns in a changing world.

Earning inflation, real investment and self-fulfilling uncertainty

We develop a model of informational interdependence between entrepreneurs and the real economy, linking economic uncertainty to entrepreneurs’ earning inflation. We show that information acquisition in the real economy discourages earning inflation. With a monopolistic competition structure, earning inflation could be self-fulling with two equilibria. In a dynamic setting, our model characterises self-fulfilling uncertainty traps with two steady-state equilibria transitional dynamics.

A REFERENCE ARCHITECTURE OF HUMAN CYBER-PHYSICAL SYSTEMS – PART III: SEMANTIC FOUNDATIONS

The design and analysis of multi-agent human cyber-physical systems in safety-critical or industry-critical domains calls for an adequate semantic foundation capable of exhaustively and rigorously describing all emergent effects in the joint dynamic behavior of the agents that are relevant to their safety and well-behavior. We present such a semantic foundation. This framework extends beyond previous approaches by extending the agent-local dynamic state beyond state components under direct control of the agent and belief about other agents (as previously suggested for understanding cooperative as well as rational behavior) to agent-local evidence and belief about the overall cooperative, competitive, or coopetitive game structure. We argue that this extension is necessary for rigorously analyzing systems of human cyber-physical systems because humans are known to employ cognitive replacement models of system dynamics that are both non-stationary and potentially incongruent. These replacement models induce visible and potentially harmful effects on their joint emergent behavior and the interaction with cyber-physical system components.

Research on the Monopolistic Characteristics and Countermeasures of China's Mobile Phone Market

With economic development and technological innovation, mobile phones have gradually become necessary for people's lives. Today's mobile phones have both standard communi-cation and powerful entertainment functions. This study uses the methodology of Litera-ture research and Comparative analysis to infer the competitive structure of the Chinese mobile phone market through secondary data collected and to provide corresponding com-petitive strategies for each manufacturer to cope with the complex social environment, which is of great significance to the development of the Chinese mobile phone market. The study found that: the competitive structure of China's mobile phone market is in a state of monopolistic competition, with high product differentiation and relatively easy exit and entry for manufacturers. With high manufacturing costs, finding a competitive strategy that works for the company to survive better in the competition is vital. Moreo-ver, among these many strategies, technological innovation is the most effective way for every manufacturer to drive.

Factor structure of the de Jong Gierveld Loneliness Scale: An ESEM approach

This research aims to examine the reliability, convergent validity, and measurement invariance of the de Jong Gierveld Loneliness Scale (DJGLS). The study focused especially on the examination of the model-data fit of various competitive factor structures in a young adult sample. The results demonstrate that the bifactor-ESEM model shows a high model-data fit according to CFI and RMSEA. In this case, it has been determined that the cross-loadings defined by the bifactor-ESEM model have an increasing effect on the model-data fit. Also with the bifactor-ESEM model, DJGLS has one highly reliable general factor and two irrelevant subfactors. Metric measurement invariance according to gender was provided. DJGLS scores were correlated moderately and highly, and were statistically significant with external variables. Finally, it can be said that DJGLS is a measurement tool with construct and convergent validity and reliability in the young adult sample. In addition, DJGLS is essentially a uni-dimensional scale and shows the best model-data fit in the bifactor-ESEM model.

Ecology theory disentangles microbial dichotomies.

Microbes are often discussed in terms of dichotomies such as copiotrophic/oligotrophic and fast/slow-growing microbes, defined using the characterisation of microbial growth in isolated cultures. The dichotomies are usually qualitative and/or study-specific, sometimes precluding clear-cut results interpretation. We can unravel microbial dichotomies as life history strategies by combining ecology theory with Monod curves, a laboratory mathematical tool of bacterial physiology that relates the specific growth rate of a microbe with the concentration of a limiting nutrient. Fitting of Monod curves provides quantities that directly correspond to key parameters in ecological theories addressing species coexistence and diversity, such as r/K selection theory, resource competition and community structure theory and the CSR triangle of life strategies. The resulting model allows us to reconcile the copiotrophic/oligotrophic and fast/slow-growing dichotomies as different subsamples of a life history strategy triangle that also includes r/K strategists. We also used the number of known carbon sources together with community structure theory to partially explain the diversity of heterotrophic microbes observed in metagenomics experiments. In sum, we propose a theoretical framework for the study of natural microbial communities that unifies several existing proposals. Its application would require the integration of metagenomics, metametabolomics, Monod curves and carbon source data.

The Impact of Competition and Market Structure on The Financial Performance and Integrity of The Nigerian Commercial Banks

The Impact of Competition and Market Structure on The Financial Performance and Integrity of The Nigerian Commercial Banks