Study On The Competition Intensity And Cooperation Intensity In The Near Field Communication Mobile Payment Alliance

In recent years, with the rapid development of e-commerce and mobile Internet, the demand for mobile payment maintains rapid growth, which makes mobile payment received significant attention in the world and achieved a rapid growth. As a new payment mode, Near Field Communication (NFC) mobile payment begins to rise in recent years. Despite its late start, it has attracted a large number of companies involved with its advantages of safety, convenience and low consumption. As the major participants in this industry, many mobile operators and financial institutions provide NFC payment service in several different operation modes. Some of them try to looking for partners in each other’s industry and establish NFC mobile payment strategic alliances.The current researches on competitive strategic alliances are mainly aimed at alliances formed by companies from the same industry. However, with the characteristics of competitive alliances, the NFC mobile strategic alliance also has its difference from the classical competitive alliances because their members are from different industries. The forms of strategic alliances have been innovated in business practices, but there is lack of research on this issue. In a strategic alliance, there are both cooperation and competition between alliance members. The intensities of these two kinds of relationship have important influences on many issues such as profit distribution and alliance stability. But in the current literature, the relevant studies are generally confined to the qualitative analysis and are lack of a systematic, quantitative study with instances.To limit these deficiencies, this study designed four gradually deepening researches using strategic alliance theory as the main theoretical foundation; analyze the characteristics of the NFC strategic alliance and the cooperation and competition intensity in this special alliance form; aim to achieve some innovations and breakthroughs in the following directions:first, according to the industry classification factor, this paper creatively put forward the concept of "cross-industry competitive strategic alliance", and analyze the motivation of this new alliance’s formation from the perspectives of both economics and evolutionary game. Second, from a theoretical point of view, analyze the main factors that affect the cooperative and competitive relationships in the NFC strategic alliance and the interaction between these factors. Third, based on the review of existing studies, choose "control power" as the main measurement index of the competition level of the NFC strategic alliance; establish a competition intensity measure model from the perspective of system theory and run validation and simulation using actual data. Fourth, establish a cooperation intensity measure model to quantitatively analyze the cooperation level of the NFC strategic alliance.The conclusions of this study are:1. Based on the latest enterprise practices of the NFC mobile payment service, this paper reclassified competitive alliances from a new perspective based on the views of the relationship among the industries that the allied companies belong to, and propose a new concept of "cross-industry competitive strategic alliance", which is defined as two or more enterprises that belong to different industries and have competitive relationships in particular integrative business area cooperate with each other and form a business partnership in forms of equity participation or cooperation contract. This cooperation is under the premise of maintaining separate operations and aiming at strategic objectives such as resources sharing, advantages complementary, cost and risk sharing et al. Then profit models and evolutionary game models are established to analyze the motivation of this new alliance mode. The results show that companies’ profits are expected to be higher after they form a cross-industry strategic alliance. The evolution trend and result of the alliance evolution are strongly affected by companies’ costs and benefits. This part is an important supplement and improvement to the strategic alliance theory.2. Based on the summary of current literatures, this paper selects eighteen main factors that affect the co-operation relationship in the NFC strategic alliance and build an interpretive structural model from the perspective of system theory. The result shows that these eighteen factors can be divided into three classes as basic factors, intermediate factors and top factors. They can be further subdivided into six levels. Then each factor’s effect pathway is described in detail. 3. Based on the interpretive structural model, this paper establishes a system dynamics model of the members’ control power in the NFC strategic alliance and selects the NFC alliance formed by China Mobile and Shanghai Pudong Development Bank to do the empirical analysis. First, China Mobile’s relevant data are used for stimulation to verify the model’s validity. Then use the factor "enterprise’s strength" to test this model’s sensitivity, and the result further verifies the adaptability and rationality of the model. Finally, this paper runs the stimulation using data of China Mobile and Shanghai Pudong Development Bank to analyze their control power. Modeling and simulation results show that enterprise’s dependence level has significant negative feedback to its control power, while its contribution level has obvious positive feedback to its control power.4. Based on the current academic research achievements and the characteristics of NFC strategic alliance, this paper uses three-dimensional theory and builds a spherical coordinates evaluation model to measure the members’ cooperation intensity, using the interdependence level, resource sharing level and capacity coupling level as the three dimensions. This model also studies the specific measurement method of each dimension and fills the theoretical gaps.