Number Of Rivals Research Articles

The competitive effects of financial and fiscal institutional arbitrage opportunities: Evidence from cross-border M&AS

This study investigates whether and when differences in the financial and fiscal regulatory systems between the countries of acquirers and targets that engage in cross-border M&As influence rivals' corporate responses. Drawing on the institutional arbitrage and competitive dynamics logics, we argue that cross-border M&As that provide opportunities for financial institutional gains for the targets and fiscal institutional gains for the acquirers pose a threat to the rivals and hence provoke an increase in the number of rivals' corporate responses. Additionally, we argue that the effect of cross-border M&As providing financial and fiscal institutional arbitrage opportunities on the number of rivals' corporate responses gets stronger with rivals' awareness, motivation, and capability to respond. An analysis of a unique dataset of rivals’ corporate activities before and after large horizontal cross-border M&As of their competitors in the manufacturing industry between 1999 and 2014 provides support for our main theoretical arguments and provides some contingent considerations.

The effect of hospital choice and competition on inequalities in waiting times

We use a quasi difference-in-difference approach to examine whether the 2006 relaxation of constraints on patient choice of hospital in the English National Health Service (NHS) affected waiting times inequalities for three common elective treatments (coronary bypass, hip replacement and knee replacement) in hospitals which faced more potential competition (number of rivals) before the choice reform was introduced relative to those which faced less competition. After the 2006 choice reform hospitals which had more rivals before 2006 had longer waits for hip and knee replacement, with one additional rival increasing the median waiting time by 2.5% and 4.0%, and the 75th quantile waiting time by 4.2% and 7.1%. There was no effect on waiting times for coronary bypass patients up to the 75th quantile of the wait distribution. The choice reform and market structure had no effect on the standard deviation of waiting times within hospitals but did increase waiting time variation within small geographical areas. Older hip replacement patients had shorter waits pre-choice reform but the gradient disappeared after it and was not affected by market structure. Before the choice reform, more deprived patients had longer waits but post-reform there was no deprivation gradient in waiting times, and the reduction in the gradient was not affected by pre-reform market structure. Overall, the results suggest that the choice reform led to longer and more dispersed waiting times in more competitive areas but deprivation related inequity was smaller in the post-choice period.

Analisis Dampak Penggunaan E-Commerce dalam Meningkatkan Omzet Penjualan Usaha Mikro Kecil Menengah di Kota Makassar

This study aims to determine what are the impacts of using E-Commerce in increasing MSME sales turnover. This study uses a qualitative approach that is descriptive analysis. The data collection techniques used are observation, interview and documentation techniques. The research subjects were 5 MSME actors in the city of Makassar. The results showed that there are two impacts of using E-Commerce, namely positive impacts and negative impacts. The positive impact is the use of E-Commerce, namely, the store can be accessed 24 hours, provides security and convenience in the transaction process, eases promotions so that it can help communicate faster with customers and can access the global market and can satisfy customers and of course can increase sales turnover. Meanwhile, the negative impact is that if the goods are damaged, the goods can be checked and result in losses in shipping and packing costs, the number of rivals, admin fees charged to buyers and sellers, the COD system that makes sellers feel disadvantaged because the funds are released after the goods arrive.

Analisis Dampak Penggunaan E-Commerce dalam Meningkatkan Omzet Penjualan Usaha Mikro Kecil Menengah di Kota Makassar

This study aims to determine what are the impacts of using E-Commerce in increasing MSME sales turnover. This study uses a qualitative approach that is descriptive analysis. The data collection techniques used are observation, interview and documentation techniques. The research subjects were 5 MSME actors in the city of Makassar. The results showed that there are two impacts of using E-Commerce, namely positive impacts and negative impacts. The positive impact is the use of E-Commerce, namely, the store can be accessed 24 hours, provides security and convenience in the transaction process, eases promotions so that it can help communicate faster with customers and can access the global market and can satisfy customers and of course can increase sales turnover. Meanwhile, the negative impact is that if the goods are damaged, the goods can be checked and result in losses in shipping and packing costs, the number of rivals, admin fees charged to buyers and sellers, the COD system that makes sellers feel disadvantaged because the funds are released after the goods arrive.

The impact of state-owned enterprises on the employment growth of manufacturing in Chinese cities: Evidence from economic census microdata

This article utilises economic census microdata to examine the impact of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) on the employment growth of manufacturing industries in Chinese cities between 2004 and 2008. The main findings show that the presence of SOEs inhibits employment growth in the manufacturing industry. Using the historical landscape of SOEs as an instrumental variable, our findings underscore that the overall impact of SOEs remains negative. This study then explores three potential mechanisms underlying this negative relationship. First, SOEs appear to have no significant impact on knowledge spillovers in their own industry. Second, SOEs tend to hinder the entry of new privately-owned enterprises (POEs) into the marketplace. Third, SOEs are generally less productive than POEs. The article also provides new evidence about dynamic externalities theory: the employment growth rate of manufacturing industries is higher in cities, with a substantial number of rivals in their own industry.

Loss aversion and competition in Vickrey auctions: Money ain't no good

A key prediction of expectations-based reference-dependent preferences and loss aversion in second-price auctions with private values is that the number of bidders should affect bids in auctions for real objects but not in auctions with induced monetary values. In order to test this distinctive comparative statics prediction, we develop an experiment where subjects bid in multiple auctions for real objects as well as auctions with induced values, each time facing a different number of rivals. Our results are broadly consistent with expectations-based reference-dependent preferences and loss aversion. We find that in real-object auctions bids decline with the intensity of competition whereas in induced-value auctions, instead, bids do not vary with the intensity of competition. Our results suggest that bidders may behave differently in real-object auctions than in induced-value ones, casting some doubt on the extent to which findings from induced-value laboratory experiments can be transferred to the field.

MapReduce service provisioning for frequent big data jobs on clouds considering data transfers

Many companies regularly run Big Data analysis, and need to optimize their resource usage considering cost, deadline, and environmental impact simultaneously. The cloud allows choosing from various virtual machines (VM) where the number and type of VMs affect the outcome such as the time for data placement and data shuffle phases, a task’s energy consumption and execution time, and the makespan of jobs. We provide provisioning and scheduling algorithms to minimize environmental impact, considering the above factors, for frequently executed MapReduce jobs. To mathematically model the problem and obtain the optimal solution, we present an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) model and then continue with two heuristic algorithms. We compare proposed algorithms against a number of rivals using extensive simulations based on publicly available real-world data. The results demonstrate that our algorithms can achieve near-optimal solutions, e.g., sometime even within 0.39% of the optimal solution obtained by ILP regarding energy consumption.

Who Do Managers Perceive As Competitors? Real Time Competitive Interactions

This paper explains why spatial distance and competitor similarity influence firm identification of perceived competitors in geographically differentiated markets. In contrast to prior studies that have used surveys or geographic area to identify competitors, I identify the revealed relative importance of a firm’s competitors by examining the competitive actions and responses of firms using data that captures the timing of price changes in the Los Angeles retail gas market. Consistent with predictions, I find that managers monitor a very small number of rivals. The results demonstrate that distance to a rival and similarity between competitors on price and the number of pumps at a station interact to influence the weights assigned to competitors.

The impact of the internet on the pricing strategies of the European low cost airlines

This study seeks to analyse the price determination of low cost airlines in Europe and the effect that Internet has on this strategy. The outcomes obtained reveal that both users and companies benefit from the use of ICTs in the purchase and sale of airline tickets: the Internet allows consumers to increase their bargaining power comparing different airlines and choosing the most competitive flight, while companies can easily check the behaviour of users to adapt their pricing strategies using internal information.More than 2500 flights of the largest European low cost airlines have been used to carry out the study. The study revealed that the most significant variables for understanding pricing strategies were the number of rivals, the behaviour of the demand and the associated costs. The results indicated that consumers should buy their tickets before 25 days prior to departure.

Applying genetic algorithm in selecting providers of supply chain in big stores

Excess competition in offering the goods and services in two previous decades throughout the world, is an undeniable fact. By increasing the number of rivals in the world class, the organizations were forced to improve home processes (processes within the enterprise) to stay in global competition arena. During recent years, determining appropriate suppliers for supply chain has had extreme importance. A lot of manufactures were looking for cooperation with appropriate suppliers to improve the level of management and competitive performance. The main goal in the process of selecting suppliers is to decrease the risk of purchase, maximize the important values of client and create high and close connection between buyer and supplier. Therefore, determining appropriate supplier in supply chain is a strategic key for accessing to organizational competitiveness.

How Does Rivals' Presence Affect Firms' Decision to Enter New Markets? Economic and Sociological Explanations

Four distinct theoretical programs have examined market entry decisions of multiunit firms, advancing different explanations for the relationship between a firm's likelihood of entry into a geographical market and the number of rivals that are already present in the target market. Within the strategy literature, theory of strategic interactions explains that firms will want to establish a foothold in markets where their multimarket competitors are scarce, but avoid markets where there are many multimarket competitors. Within economic geography, positive externalities such as increase in demand explain firms' desire to locate close to their rivals whereas negative externalities such as competition explain their desire to avoid them. Within the ecological tradition, density dependence theory explains this relationship in terms of legitimation of an organizational form in a particular market and subsequently increased competition for resources there. Within new institutional theory, the presence of rivals is seen as a signal that a particular market is suitable for entry. Although generally quoted and mentioned in the literature, these four explanations have not been sufficiently separated to indicate whether these four mechanisms all operate simultaneously or whether one of them might account for the often found inverse-U-shaped relationship. Distinguishing firms with different strategies and using various moderators, we test the four explanations jointly and demonstrate their scope of operation. Data, as supplemental material, are available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2013.1723 . This paper was accepted by Jesper Sørensen, organizations.

Management Insights

Management Insights

Do cost-sharing and entry deregulation curb pharmaceutical innovation?

This paper examines the role of both cost-sharing schemes in health insurance systems and the regulation of entry into the pharmaceutical sector for pharmaceutical R&D expenditure and drug prices. The analysis suggests that both an increase in the coinsurance rate and stricter price regulations adversely affect R&D spending in the pharmaceutical sector. In contrast, entry deregulation may lead to higher R&D spending of pharmaceutical companies. The relationship between R&D spending per firm and the number of firms may be hump-shaped. In this case, the number of rivals which maximizes R&D expenditure per firm is decreasing in the coinsurance rate and increasing in labor productivity.

What Determines Chinese Firms’ Decision on Implementing Voluntary Environmental Schemes?

Understanding why firms choose to implement voluntary environmental schemes in a large polluted country like China is important for both environmental economists and policy makers. In this paper, we utilize unique plant-level survey data of 270 Chinese firms in manufacturing industry to identify the key determinants of their decisions on certifying ISO 14001 environmental management standard and the Chinese Environmental Label. The empirical results exhibit that while there are a number of factors (e.g., ownership, firm size, target market, and the number of rivals) having similar effects on the certification decisions between the two examined programs, the unique factors that only affect the decision of certifying one program (i.e., ISO 14001 or the Chinese Environmental Label) are also observed.

The Liberalisation of Tariff Rate Quotas under Oligopolistic Competition

AbstractSeveral proposals for liberalising agricultural tariff rate quotas (TRQs) have been proposed within the WTO Doha Development Round. The literature suggests that the effectiveness of liberalisation depends upon which of the three elements of a TRQ constrains imports. Most contributions assume perfect competition. This article uses an oligopoly two‐stage capacity constrained model, in which the mode of competition is endogenous, to investigate the impact of different liberalisation options of TRQs, that is, the reduction in the in‐quota and out‐of‐quota tariffs and the expansion of the quota. This article shows that consideration of the nature of competition between traders may provide unconventional conclusions about the effectiveness of the various TRQ liberalisation options; furthermore, the article shows how an increase in the number of rivals, under certain circumstances, may be more effective in increasing trade than reducing tariffs.

J. Bishop, Believing by Faith: An Essay in the Epistemology of Religious Belief

Since the collapse of logical positivism, natural theology and various other religious philosophies which put a greater emphasis on empirical evidence have become more prominent. Consequently, fideists, those who argue that belief in God does not require evidence, have had to deal with an increasing number of rivals. In his book Believing by Faith John Bishop challenges this trend by providing an extremely articulate defense of a moderate version of fideism. Bishop continuously compares his view with evidentialism. As their name might imply evidentialists argue that religious belief requires evidence. Bishop notes how tremendous debate currently exists within the philosophy of religion concerning the existence of God and the status of various other truth clams despite tremendous effort to resolve this debate. The lack of consensus amongst those who have studied the evidence relevant to the debate over religion does not bode well for those who believe people need evidence in order to accept theism. Note that Bishop does not argue that differing opinions amongst first-class intellectuals proves evidential ambiguity. It is possible that a significant number of educated people are objectively wrong. Still, he does argue that evidential ambiguity concerning religious belief is at least a reasonable possibility. Consequently, Bishop spends the rest of his pages addressing what happens to religious belief under evidential ambiguity. Bishop also notes that evidentialism cannot justify religious belief on moral or epistemic grounds if evidential ambiguity exists, thus making an examination of fideism even more important. One of Bishop’s central tenets in Believing by Faith is that religious belief is not just an epistemic question, but also a moral one. Bishop makes a distinction between what he calls the first and second locus of doxastic control, which are both related to a doxastic framework. For Bishop, a doxastic framework is ‘‘a framework of beliefs

PRODUCT VARIETY AND COMPETITION IN THE RETAIL MARKET FOR EYEGLASSES*

ABSTRACTI use original data on eyewear retailers in a cross‐section of U.S. markets to study how firms' product range choices vary with the degree of local competition. Market level regressions show average per firm variety declining in the number of rivals. In regressions at the firm level, taking account of spatial differentiation within each market, a non‐monotonic relationship between product ranges and competition is apparent. As the number of nearby rivals increases, per firm variety may first rise before eventually declining. Explanations for this pattern are offered, in terms of a tradeoff between business stealing and clustering effects.

Presence of rivals reduces mating probability but does not affect ejaculate size in the freshwater crayfish Austropotamobius italicus

Sperm competition models predict that males should adjust their sperm expenditure according to the risk and intensity of sperm competition, increasing it when competing with at least one other ejaculate and decreasing it when the number of competing ejaculates rises above two. However, when the raffle to fertilize eggs is strongly loaded due to sperm removal by subsequent rivals, it could be hypothesized that first-mating males progressively decrease their sperm expenditure and/or defer copulation with an increasing number of nearby competitors. Here, by varying experimentally the number of competitors around a mating pair, we analysed mating behaviour of both sexes and sperm expenditure in relation to variation in the immediate risk of sperm competition in the freshwater crayfish Austropotamobius italicus , a species where males remove all or part and feed on sperm laid by previous mating males. We found that male mating behaviour varied significantly with increasing number of rivals, because interactions between focal males and competitors, as well as male refusals to copulate, increased with number of the latter. As a consequence, the probability to reach an effective copulation decreased with increasing number of competitors. However, males released similar amounts of sperm independently of the number of surrounding competitors. Thus, the observed lack of variation in sperm expenditure in relation to the number of surrounding rivals suggests that freshwater crayfish males are unable to adjust the size of their ejaculates to short-term variation in the immediate risk of sperm competition.

RELATIVE SIZE, ENTRY AND EXIT OF FIRMS, AND SEARCH BEHAVIOR.

We examine the antecedents of local search behavior by focusing on relational and contextual factors, as opposed to typical focus on internal firm factors. We developed the concept of a firm's relative size, defined as the number of rivals in the market that have fewer resources than the focal firm, and found in a panel study that firms with larger relative size in a market search more intensely within the local domain than firms with smaller relative size. We also found that the entry and exit of similar and dissimilar firms moderate this relationship. The implications for innovation, capabilities and evolution literatures are discussed.

Strategic ejaculation in the egg parasitoid Trichogramma turkestanica (Hymenoptera: Trichogrammatidae)

Abstract 1. Several parameters influence sperm allocation by males, including their size and sperm stock, intra‐specific variability, quality of females’, as well as the risk and intensity of sperm competition.2. Models predict that males should invest the maximum ejaculate size when sperm competition intensity is low. As sperm competition intensity increases, males should decrease the number of sperm transferred during mating.3. This decrease in sperm transfer to females occurs because the benefits gained by males with each extra unit of expenditure on sperm decrease. When sperm supply is not unlimited, males could expect a better return by keeping some or all sperm for mating under lower competition intensity.4. In this study, the ejaculate size of males that were kept in groups of one, five or 10 males prior to mating, has been investigated in the haplodiploid egg parasitoid Trichogramma turkestanica Meyer (Hymenoptera: Trichogrammatidae).5. As predicted by theory, the number of sperm transferred decreased significantly with an increase in the number of rivals.6. This is the first study showing strategic sperm allocation depending on sperm competition intensity in a parasitoid.