Empirical Study On The Relationship Between Multipoint Competition And Strategic Decision、Performance In Car Manufacturing Industry

With the continuous development and growth of the markets and firms, researchers have noted the prominence of the conglomerate business and multi-unit organizational(multiunit) firms, as well as recent work places great emphasis on this theme. Because of the segmentation of geographic market and implementing the strategy of diversification, organization operating in several related markets rather than single market. Multimarket competition includes both inter-and intra-market competition, firms may compete with some rivals that offers a homogenous good and/or with a rival offering a differentiated good in adjoining geographic markets.With the globalization of the world economy and the dynamic competitive environment, especially after joining the World Trade Organization(WTO), foreign multinational companies began to spring up in Chinese market, domestic automobile firms are confronting with strong competition pressure nowadays.The field of competitive dynamics has flourished in recent years aiming at studying competitive interactions among competitors which is operating in a increasingly complex environment. Thus, we follow the research hotspot of industry economics and strategic management fields on multimarket competition. Aiming at the problem of multimarket competition of automobile industry, we take use of network theory, strategic group theory and competitive dynamics theory to explore the inter-firm rivalry in inter-and intra-market.First of all, based on the analyzes and induction of domestic and foreign literature on multimarket competition, by using the network theory we constructed bipartite network model for Chinese automobile industry firms from2007to2012. By using the modularity and community detection method in bipartite networks, divided the firms into several closely strategic groups. Our analysis is built on a framework, the awareness-motivation-capability (AMC) model, to discovering market network competition.Furthermore, after constructing the competitive pressure weighted network, we discuss the competitive interaction and performance of competitive pressure on firms. Finally, combining traditional social network theory, such as structural holes, to explore the impact on the multimarket firms.In this paper, by applying panel data model of empirical analysis, we get several meaningful and significant conclusions as follows:(1) The relationship between the complexity of competitive repertoires and multimarket contract is inverted U-shape.(2) Multimarket contacts pose a significant positive impact on performance of multimarket firms.(3) Structure hole among firms and diversification have significant positive impact on performance of multimarket firms.(4) As the competitive pressures among firms rises, the simplicity of competitive repertoires increases.(5) However, mutual forbearance of multimarket companies pose no spillovers effect on single point company in the network.The innovation of this paper lies in the following aspects. First of all, network theory is introduced to multimarket competition, it puts forward a new perspective for the study of multimarket competition. Secondly, compared to the dyad level and market level, it applied a new perspective, strategic group analysis level to reflects the interdependence and interaction among firms which captured the close contract of network members. Finally, it reveals the interaction of automobile in the more competitive environment, provides a new perspective for reference to interpret domestic automobile firms’behavior.