Managerial and Decision Economics最新文献

Competition policy plays an important role in maintaining market competition. However, its effectiveness is not yet well understood, particularly in developing countries. China's Fair Competition Review System (FCRS) shifts the focus from correcting monopolies after the fact to preventing anti-competitive policies in advance. This approach effectively lowers administrative monopolies, thus reducing inefficient labor investments. We investigate how competition policy affects firm efficiency in developing countries, where administrative monopolies are widespread. Because labor investment efficiency is highly sensitive to regional administrative monopolies, we use it as our central outcome. Leveraging the FCRS as a quasi-natural experiment, we show that competition policy significantly improves firms' labor investment efficiency in regions with higher levels of administrative monopoly. Further analysis indicates that competition policy enhances firm efficiency by increasing market competition and reducing firms' environmental uncertainty. The effects are especially strong in state-owned enterprises. Overall, our findings underscore that managing administrative monopolies is crucial for improving labor investment efficiency.

Gamification designs and strategies to induce users' low-carbon consumption decisions (LCCDs) are attracting attention from academia and industry. Research suggests that individual decisions are often subject to joint interventions. Exploring effective intervention strategies requires constructing a systematic model with multiple dimensions and theoretical support. Drawing on goal-framing theory and social impact theory, this study develops a multiagent model in the context of gamification, examining the intervention effects of individual preferences, gamified-incentives, and social interactions on users' LCCDs. The findings contribute to achieving a low-carbon society and provide a theoretical foundation and practical guides for developing gamified platform strategies.

Banks are dedicated to serving the real economy. In recent years, regulatory technology (RegTech) has served as a prime focus in the banking sector and may further spillover to external parties. This paper aims to investigate whether bank RegTech enhances corporate investment efficiency (CIE) through its influence on lending activities. Using novel matched bank–firm loan data from 2013 to 2023, we empirically demonstrate that bank RegTech improves CIE. A 1% rise in the standard deviation of bank RegTech corresponds to a maximum of approximately 18.13% improvement in average CIE. Specifically, bank RegTech enhances CIE by mitigating financing constraints, strengthening governance capabilities, and reducing operational risks. The beneficial effects of bank RegTech on CIE are further amplified by information transparency and media coverage, while industry competition weakens this effect. The impact of bank RegTech on CIE exhibits heterogeneous characteristics, varying with different dimensions of bank RegTech and firm-level characteristics. Our results still hold after alleviating endogeneity concerns and performing robustness checks. Furthermore, we find that improvements in CIE enhance firm performance, stimulate innovation, and promote job creation.

The information interaction features and deceptive promotion phenomena in live streaming e-commerce significantly influence consumers' purchase decisions, directly affecting brand owners' choices regarding their live streaming strategies. In light of this, the impacts of information interaction and deceptive promotion on the purchase behavior of strategic consumers are considered, and a two-period model of consumer utility and brand owner profit is constructed under nine optional sales scenarios. By optimizing the equilibrium solutions to models and conducting a comparative analysis, this study explores the impacts of factors such as informative degree, deceptive promotion degree, and penalty costs on the brand owner's optimal strategy of product quality and the selection of live streaming modes (including whether to provide live streaming, when to introduce it, and whether to conduct deceptive promotion during live streaming) under different scenarios. Moreover, the conditions in which the brand owner is more inclined to opt for deceptive promotion strategies are revealed. These findings provide optimal operational strategies for brand owners in live streaming sales while offering support for government and regulatory agencies seeking effective measures to combat deceptive promotion.

This paper examines union bargaining choices between RTM (right-to-manage) and EB (efficient bargaining) under Kantian optimization. We show that Kantian optimization constitutes a subgame perfect equilibrium, yielding higher firm profits and labor benefits than Nashian equilibrium, though potentially reducing consumer surplus. In Kantian optimization, the cooperation between the owners will hold the conventional belief that profits under RTM exceed those under EB, while the outputs under EB exceed those under RTM. But the workers' wages are reversed. The endogenous choice between the Kantian and Nash principles by firms and unions leads to higher wages and improves individual worker's welfare.

We consider an evolutionary game involving an e-commerce platform (EP) and a government regulatory department (GRD), in which the EP determines whether to carry out price discrimination under unreliable consumer oversight and the GRD decides whether to monitor the EP taking into account the supervision cost. Analytical results reveal that, when consumer oversight is notably unreliable, or even when it is somewhat reliable but the conditions are not ripe for government supervision, price discrimination is inevitable. With the presence of consumer oversight, the GRD can deter the EP from engaging in price discrimination without incurring significant supervision costs, enjoying a “free ride” in maintaining market fairness. However, when the GRD's supervision cost are sufficiently low, or even if they are not low but consumer oversight remains highly unreliable, it becomes advantageous for the GRD to supervise the EP. Contrary to the prevailing notion that the GRD ought to vigorously enhance consumer oversight, our research indicates that augmenting the consumer oversight reliability may not always be in the GRD's best interest. Furthermore, as time progresses, bolstering the reliability of consumer oversight is instrumental in swiftly eradicating prevalent price discrimination, while diminishing the cost associated with supervision would facilitate the prompt initiation of government supervision.

This study examines how distracted institutional investors affect corporate investment. Results show that institutional investor distraction reduces investment efficiency due to weakened supervision and information feedback to managers, evidenced by fewer site visits. Cross-sectional analyses provide additional evidence that the effect of distraction is mitigated in firms with superior alternative supervision mechanisms, less reliance on information from institutional investors, and easier access to information from other sources. We also find that corporate investment activities are particularly sensitive to the distraction of pressure-resistant institutional investors. Overall, our study demonstrates the oversight and information feedback roles of institutional investors from a limited attention perspective in emerging capital markets.

In this paper, the effect of ESG performance on stock mispricing is explored across all A-share listed companies from 2010 to 2022. The research scope consists of all A-share listed companies from 2010 to 2022, and both the effect of ESG performance and the underlying mechanisms are explored. The findings of this study indicate a negative relationship between ESG performance and stock mispricing which suggests that improved ESG performance is effective in decreasing stock price discrepancies. In addition, corporate heterogeneity was considered in additional analysis and indicates that the reducing influence of ESG performance on stock mispricing becomes more evident in specific types of companies consisting of those with weaker internal controls, non–state-owned status, operation outside of polluting industries, and those experiencing considerable financing limitations. Mechanism tests suggest that ESG performance contributes to the reduction of stock mispricing through the enhancement of digital transformation and greater transparency. Finally, the study considered conditions of low credibility in corporate information disclosure and market instability. Under these specific conditions, ESG performance demonstrates a significant negative effect on stock mispricing for companies with a smaller proportion of institutional investors. Through the insights gained from this research, companies can effectively work to lower stock mispricing. Enhancing corporate value can be achieved by companies through rigorous ESG standard disclosure and increased transparency. These actions, accordingly, promote market transparency and stability. Finally, these improvements contribute to the advancement of overall environmental and social governance. This study holds practical implications for both corporations and the financial market.

In light of the rapid development of online payment and the consistent decline in household saving rate in China over the past decade, this paper examines the impact of online payment on household saving rate. By conducting theoretical analyses, we find that online payment decreases household saving rate by breaking through three internal mechanisms: psychological constraints, geographic constraints and income constraints. Empirical analysis based on the China Family Panel Studies survey data (2014, 2016, and 2018) supports the theoretical conclusions, particularly highlighting that online payment is more likely to reduce saving rates among individuals in western and central regions, females, younger individuals, those with lower educational level, and lower income groups. Results remain robust after addressing endogeneity with instrumental variable method, propensity score matching (PSM), propensity score matching with difference-in-difference (PSMDID), and treatment effects model.

This study constructs liquidity and volatility indicators based on the four phases of EU ETS and analyses tail dependence using Copula models. The results indicate strong tail dependence between liquidity and volatility in the fourth phase. The Amihud illiquidity ratio combined with the stochastic volatility model identifies high volatility risks during liquidity scarcity, while the Gibbs measure combined with the stochastic volatility model identifies low volatility risks. The robustness of the results is tested by classifying different periods based on structural breaks and assessing tail dependence, and by applying machine learning algorithms to remove outliers before measuring tail dependence.