Search Results (341)

The entry of JD.com into the food delivery sector and the ensuing subsidy competition have resulted in irrational competition, merchant profit squeezes, and food safety risks in China. This study therefore investigates the collaborative governance mechanisms for food delivery platforms under involutionary competition driven by traffic contestation. A two-agent evolutionary game model between platforms and merchants is developed, and Q-learning simulations are conducted to capture dynamic learning behaviors. The analysis examines the effects of coupon face value, cost-sharing mechanisms, traffic incentives, and government incentive-penalty policies on the strategic choices of both agents. Key findings reveal that merchants are more sensitive than platforms to traffic incentives and government penalties. Traffic-dependent merchants and traffic-independent merchants exhibit significantly different responses to government interventions. The coupon face value demonstrates a threshold effect, where only a reasonable range encourages compliant behavior among both parties. Based on these results, a collaborative governance framework is proposed. For traffic-dependent merchants, the government should focus on regulating platform behaviors and supervising coupon value controls, while platforms should establish a reward-oriented, penalty-supported incentive mechanism. For traffic-independent merchants, the government should strengthen consumer-reporting penalty mechanisms and strictly control collusion risks between platforms and merchants. Platforms should increase inspection frequency and reinforce penalties to prevent, at the source, the decline in product quality and market disorder induced by involutionary competition. This study provides strategic insights for achieving collaborative governance of involutionary competition in platform economies under intense traffic contestation. Full article

As uncertainty increases within the aviation industry, the importance of airport sustainability has come to the forefront, necessitating continuous demand generation through strategic aviation marketing. Consequently, there is an urgent need to analyze the practical efficacy of the incentive programs implemented primarily by global airports. In particular, amid intense competition among Northeast Asian airports to attract airlines, this study empirically analyzes the effects of Incheon International Airport’s (ICN) incentive programs on airline supply and passenger demand growth. To this end, utilizing empirical data from ICN spanning 2016 to 2024, this research quantitatively establishes the causal mechanism between incentive programs, supply expansion, and demand growth. Specifically, it comprehensively evaluates the impact of incentives provided for new airline entry and new route expansion, while comparing the effects across different airline business models. The empirical results confirm that the effects vary significantly depending on the type of incentive program and the airline category. Furthermore, the findings indicate that airport incentives are not merely sunk costs, but rather strategic investments that generate measurable aviation demand and airport revenue. However, the analysis also suggests a need to supplement and refine these incentive schemes to tailor them to specific airline types. Full article

This study examines the association between exchange rate volatility, the use of externally-oriented and strategically-focused management accounting practices (i.e., Strategic Management Accounting, SMA), and competitive advantage among listed manufacturing firms in an emerging economy. Drawing on contingency theory and the resource-based view (RBV), the study investigates whether exchange rate volatility influences SMA usage and whether SMA usage enhances firms’ competitive advantage under volatile foreign exchange conditions. Panel regression techniques with firm and year fixed effects were employed using data obtained from the annual reports of 56 listed manufacturing firms over the period 2015–2024. The findings reveal a positive and statistically significant association between exchange rate volatility and SMA usage, including both customer accounting and competitor accounting practices, suggesting that firms intensify externally oriented strategic accounting activities in response to foreign exchange uncertainty. The study further finds that SMA usage intensity positively moderates the relationship between exchange rate volatility and competitive advantage, as firms with more intensive SMA usage exhibit stronger relative competitive advantage in return on assets and market valuation under volatile exchange rate conditions. The findings support contingency theory by demonstrating that firms adapt their management accounting systems to environmental uncertainty, while the resource-based view explains how SMA functions as a strategic organisational capability that enhances competitive resilience. Robustness tests using entropy balancing, Driscoll–Kraay estimations, and alternative measures of exchange rate volatility confirm the stability and reliability of the results. Overall, the study contributes to the strategic management accounting (SMA) and international business literature by providing evidence that exchange rate volatility is associated with greater SMA usage and that more intensive SMA usage is, in turn, associated with stronger competitive resilience under conditions of economic uncertainty. The study also provides important practical implications for managers and policymakers in contexts where persistent exchange rate instability continues to shape business performance and strategic decision-making. Full article

The global shift toward electric vehicles (EVs) may alter the competitiveness of automobile-exporting countries. This study measures revealed comparative advantage (RCA) and relative export competitiveness (REC) and examines their determinants for 10 major automobile-exporting countries from 2001 to 2022. The results show that Mexico, Germany, Japan, and Republic of Korea have strong automobile export competitiveness, Thailand and the United States show moderate competitiveness, while China, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Malaysia record lower RCA and REC values. The regression results indicate that reported EV production status is positively associated with both RCA and REC. Physical capital per worker and labor productivity are also positively associated with competitiveness, while automobile production growth is negatively associated with both indicators. These findings suggest that automobile export competitiveness during the EV transition may depend not only on participation in EV production but also on capital intensity, labor productivity, production efficiency, product quality, and integration into export markets. Policy efforts should therefore support EV-related capabilities while also improving productivity, quality upgrading, and global value-chain integration. Full article

Sustainable innovation constitutes the cornerstone of firms’ long-term competitive edge, yet the underlying mechanisms via which patient capital facilitates corporate sustainable innovation remain understudied. Based on a sample of Chinese A-share listed firms spanning 2013 to 2024, this study operationalizes patient capital through two proxies: relational debt and stable institutional ownership. We systematically investigate the impact of patient capital on sustainable innovation, alongside the mediating pathway of internal control quality and the moderating role of climate policy uncertainty. The empirical outcomes indicate that both forms of patient capital exert a significant positive effect on sustainable innovation, with internal control quality serving as a partial mediator in this relationship. Additionally, climate policy uncertainty reinforces the promotional influence of patient capital on sustainable innovation. We further stratify heterogeneity analyses into two dimensions: firm-inherent heterogeneity and external environmental heterogeneity. From the perspective of endogenous firm attributes, the innovation-stimulating effect of patient capital differs markedly across enterprises with distinct ownership types, life-cycle stages, and total asset sizes. Externally, the observed positive impact varies considerably conditional on industrial factor intensity and the regional marketization degree of the firm’s location. These findings expand the existing literature concerning long-term capital and sustainable innovation, and yield actionable implications for corporate management, institutional investors, and policymakers. Full article

Global population growth and the demand for sustainable food systems have pushed microalgae into the spotlight as promising novel food resources. They are rich in protein, omega-3 fatty acids, and bioactive pigments including astaxanthin and phycocyanin. Unlike conventional farming, microalgae cultivation can be conducted on non-arable land and may reduce direct competition with conventional food crops for land resources, depending on the production system used. Regulatory progress in China, the European Union (EU), and the United States has resulted in the authorization or approval of several microalgal species and microalgae-derived ingredients for specific food and nutritional applications, including dietary supplements, infant nutrition products, and alternative protein ingredients. Despite these advances, broader commercial adoption remains constrained by several challenges, such as off-flavors and the dark green color, high production costs from closed photobioreactors and energy-intensive downstream purification, fragmented regulatory frameworks across jurisdictions and limited long-term data on bioavailability, allergenicity, safety, and dose–response relationships for some emerging strains. This review focuses on microalgae as novel food resources, covering regulatory approvals, strain selection, high-value utilization, and market translation, synthesizes evidence on nutritional evaluation, application scenarios, and global regulatory differences, analyzes key bottlenecks, and proposes pathways to bridge fundamental research with industrial practice. It also highlights unresolved knowledge gaps to guide future research and policy. Full article

This paper considers a multi-period two-sided asymmetric information model with infinitely long-lived sellers and short-lived buyers. I assume that two exogenously given qualities are offered in the market. Each period, a consumer, who is uncertain about the quality of the offered product, observes her pairwise matched seller’s price and a noisy signal of quality that cannot be manipulated by the seller. Prices are fixed and it is common knowledge that consumers are not willing to pay a high price for the low-quality product. A matched seller with a low-quality good can choose to be either honest (by charging the lower market price) or dishonest (by charging the higher price). Sellers’ incentives to misrepresent quality depend on how current trade outcomes affect future access to consumer traffic. I show that the strength of the informational role of prices is non-decreasing in the intensity of competition for future consumer traffic in equilibrium and that consumers do not benefit from more intense competition. Full article

Traditional olive groves are widely recognised as providers of landscape, environmental and cultural public goods in Mediterranean rural areas, but their long-term economic viability remains uncertain. This study assesses the income gap between traditional, intensive and super-high-density (SHD) olive-growing systems in a representative hill olive-growing area in Tuscany (central Italy), characterised by physical and structural conditions typical of traditional Mediterranean systems. Using a discounted cash-flow framework, the analysis compares long-term financial performance through standard investment appraisal indicators and uses the Equivalent Annual Value (EAV) as a policy-relevant benchmark for calibrating support. The results reveal a clear structural divergence: while intensive and SHD systems achieve higher profitability and faster capital recovery, the traditional system exhibits a persistent income disadvantage under market conditions. The estimated EAV gap amounts to approximately 950 €/ha relative to the intensive system and 3104 €/ha relative to the SHD system—values that represent the additional annual support required to preserve traditional olive groves and prevent abandonment. These values can also be interpreted as the annual private opportunity cost of maintaining traditional olive landscapes rather than converting them to more financially competitive systems. Break-even analysis further shows that the traditional system requires an oil price of at least 9.6 €/kg to achieve economic viability without public support, compared to 6.97 €/kg and 4.13 €/kg for the intensive and SHD systems, respectively. The findings highlight a structural misalignment between private profitability and social value, suggesting that the conservation of traditional olive landscapes cannot rely on market mechanisms alone and requires targeted, evidence-based policy instruments. Full article

The construction sector operates under conditions of high capital intensity, project complexity, cost uncertainty, fragmented supply chains, and increasing pressure to improve efficiency, sustainability, and long-term competitiveness. Although prior research has emphasized the importance of organizational resources and knowledge-based capabilities for competitive advantage, fewer empirical studies have examined how internal capacities, intellectual capital, and knowledge sharing jointly explain sustainable competitive advantage in construction companies. Drawing on the resource-based view, the knowledge-based view, and the dynamic capabilities perspective, this study examines the effects of marketing capacity, financial capacity, innovative capacity, management capacity, human capacity, human capital, structural capital, relational capital, and knowledge sharing on sustainable competitive advantage in the construction sector. Survey data were collected from 306 employees working in construction companies in the Republic of Serbia and analyzed using confirmatory factor analysis and covariance-based structural equation modeling. The measurement model demonstrated satisfactory reliability, convergent validity, and discriminant validity. The structural results indicate that financial capacity is the only significant internal capacity predicting sustainable competitive advantage, while relational capital is the only significant dimension of intellectual capital. Marketing capacity, innovative capacity, management capacity, human capacity, human capital, structural capital, and knowledge sharing did not show significant direct effects. The study contributes to research on sustainable competitive advantage by showing that, in construction companies, competitiveness is most strongly associated with financial robustness and stakeholder-based relational strength. For managers, the findings highlight the importance of strengthening liquidity, investment capacity, risk absorption, and long-term relationships with clients, suppliers, subcontractors, and institutional stakeholders. Full article

Achieving carbon neutrality requires simultaneous advances in both the quantity and quality of low-carbon technology innovation (LCTI). This paper uses a country–industry–year three-dimensional panel dataset covering 25 EU member states and 39 two-digit NACE Rev. 2 industries over the period 2003–2020 to examine the effects of energy market integration (EMI) on LCTI quantity and quality. An EMI index is constructed based on cross-national energy price dispersion, and the analysis employs Poisson pseudo-maximum likelihood estimation with three-way fixed effects, complemented by a Bartik instrumental variable and double/debiased machine learning as supporting robustness evidence. Results show that: (1) EMI exerts significant positive effects on both LCTI quantity and quality; (2) Mechanism tests reveal that EMI operates through two channels: expansion of energy R&D investment and intensification of cross-border knowledge spillovers; (3) Heterogeneity analysis shows that the promoting effects are concentrated in countries with adequate R&D investment and active energy market competition, and in industries with low emission intensity and low energy intensity. These findings suggest that deepening regional energy market integration constitutes a meaningful institutional complement to conventional low-carbon innovation policy. Full article

Item-to-group recommendation identifies the most compatible user groups for a specific item provider to enable precision marketing, such as recommending fruit products to the most receptive consumer communities. Existing graph-based recommendations typically treat social relationships as static binary links, failing to capture variations in interaction intensity driven by user preferences. Moreover, these models largely overlook the structural relevance of intra-group connections, leading to unreliable group representations. To address these challenges, we propose the Preference-Weighted Neighbor-Aware Group Recommendation Network (PNGRN). Specifically, social edges are first reweighted using preference signals derived from historical user–item rating interactions, thereby suppressing socially connected but preference-inconsistent neighbors during aggregation. Structurally cohesive candidate groups are then identified via k-core decomposition, retaining only subgraphs where every member has at least k internal connections. A neighbor-aware graph convolutional network (GCN) module is further introduced to incorporate external social neighborhood features into group representations. This ensures that the learned group profiles reflect both internal structural stability and the external social context. Experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that PNGRN consistently outperforms competitive baselines across all evaluation metrics. Notably, on the MovieLens-1M dataset, PNGRN achieves up to a 9.85% improvement in Precision@20 and a 8.98% gain in NDCG@20. These results validate the necessity of coupling topological density with external social influence, and this work offer a scalable framework for precision group-targeted marketing. Full article

Firms can gain a competitive advantage through a strategic patent portfolio, wherein patents elucidate technological advancements and establish legal barriers that keep competitors out. However, patents do not provide a perpetual monopoly within the prevailing open innovation paradigm, which means that firms should keep up with innovation input and patent applications to preserve their market dominance. Fostering technological breakthroughs in the patent network thus becomes a critical issue. Anchored in the theoretical views of open innovation, this study conducts an empirical analysis of patent data to examine how patent network structural features influence the technologies’ breakthrough tendency in the field of autonomous driving (AD). The findings indicate that centrality metrics such as degree centrality, harmonic centrality, and betweenness centrality within AD patent networks exert significant influence on technological breakthrough tendency, and the patent family size plays a moderating role in these relationships. Moreover, this research advances theoretical insights for patent strategy formulation in emerging firms of AD, with broader implications for other technology-intensive sectors. Full article

This study examines the productive specialization of Chiquinquirá, Boyacá (Colombia), as a strategy to foster its economic development. The central issue lies in the fact that, although certain economic activities exhibit some degree of efficiency, they face productivity constraints that prevent them from evolving into sustainable competitive advantages and from generating higher levels of territorial well-being. The findings indicate that the municipality is relatively abundant in labor, and therefore its productive vocation is oriented toward labor-intensive sectors, particularly those related to tourism. However, these sectors display low levels of efficiency, leading to a development proposal based on the implementation of a tourism cluster initiative under a smart specialization approach. This strategy is intended to articulate key actors and resources to overcome market failures, enhance productivity through innovation and human capital formation, and ultimately transform local capabilities into sustainable competitiveness and improved community well-being. Full article

The tension between corporate growth and sustainability is a common governance dilemma faced by transitional economies in their green development. This study incorporates corporate ESG performance and its potential influencing factors into the analysis framework and constructs a theoretical model to capture the relationship between China’s National Demonstration Base policy for Mass Entrepreneurship and Innovation (MEI) and corporate ESG performance, based on the framework that integrates resource enablement, reputation accumulation and information governance. Leveraging the quasi-natural experiment provided by China’s National Demonstration Program for Mass Entrepreneurship and Innovation (MEI), this study systematically evaluates the impact of China’s demonstration policy on corporate ESG performance, drawing on data from A-share listed companies spanning 2010 to 2024. The study finds that the demonstration policy significantly improves enterprise ESG performance, which remains robust after a series of robustness tests. The mechanism test reveals that the policy promotes firms’ green technology innovation by lowering innovation costs, facilitates the accumulation of social reputational capital by incentivizing charitable donations, and compels improvements in information disclosure quality by strengthening market-oriented oversight. Heterogeneity analysis shows that the policy effects are more prominent among heavy polluting industries, large-scale enterprises and firms at the mature stage. Moreover, industry competition intensity and digital transformation have a positive moderating effect on the policy effects. This paper enriches the theoretical dialogue between institutional innovation policy and enterprise sustainable development, providing empirical evidence for the development of a collaborative ESG governance mechanism characterized by an active government and an efficient market. Full article

The China Containerized Freight Index exhibits multi-scale periodicity and nonlinear responses to uncertainty, which challenge traditional forecasting methods. This study proposes a dynamic multi-stage deep learning framework with COVID-19 as an interval node to construct event windows. Breakpoint detection identifies shipping-related events. A three-stage procedure, including Maximal Information Coefficient, Boruta, and Granger causality, selects uncertainty risk indicators as core features, while K-shape clustering groups the exogenous variables. The proposed hybrid model integrates a Temporal Convolution Kolmogorov–Arnold Network with a Warped Fourier and Shock Kernel. Prophet decomposition supplies baseline and residual terms. Temporal Convolution Kolmogorov–Arnold Network unifies local temporal feature extraction and universal nonlinear approximation under sparse samples. The Warped Fourier component adapts to drifting and superimposed seasonality, and the Shock Kernel quantifies uncertainty shock intensity and decay. A gating fusion mechanism suppresses noise and enhances information efficiency. Comparative experiments demonstrate competitive accuracy and robustness, with statistically significant gains in several benchmark comparisons; ablation studies confirm incremental contributions of each component. Empirical analysis shows that under event-driven uncertainty, demand-side policy variables show stronger predictive relevance to China Containerized Freight Index fluctuations, while simultaneously transmitting effects to the carbon market and accelerating the green energy cost transition. These findings provide insights for freight rate forecasting and shipping market risk management. Full article