摘要
与传统商业关系相比,日益复杂的现代商业网络使企业能够更好地拓展新客户关系,从而缓解过度依赖单一客户关系的商业风险。本文基于2009—2017年上市公司数据,考察了企业网络地位与结构对商业关系的影响,研究发现:与位于网络边缘地位的企业相比,核心企业更有可能利用网络优势来分散客户市场份额,但同时位于核心位置的商业伙伴也越难以被替代;基于客户-供应商网络的共享商业关系、商业搜寻效率均有助于企业进行商业关系分散化,这一作用当共享联系越为紧密、共享相似度越高时更为显著,但现有客户可替代性越低、商业关系持续时间越长会增大分散化难度;网络地位和结构从商业关系的集约边际和扩展边际影响着企业分散商业风险的能力。本文研究证实了现代商业网络有助于促进企业商业关系的分散化,以更为灵活地防范市场环境不确定性的经营风险。
Compared with traditional business relationships,business ties with customers and suppliers are becoming increasingly complex in modern business networks,and firms are more exposed to business risk contagion originated from their business partners(Barrot&Sauvagnat,2016;Carvalho et al.,2016;Demir et al.,2018).Therefore,firms usually have strong motivation to diversify their business partners(customers or suppliers)to better manage their business relationship,especially reducing over-reliance on their larger business partners(Cimoli et al.,2011;Mania&Rieber,2019;Daruich et al.,2019;Kramarz et al.,2019).From a novel perspective of business network position,we attempt to investigate in this paper whether firms with higher degree of network centrality are more likely to better develop new customer-supplier relationships,thereby mitigating the risk of over-concentration of large business partners.As the importance of business network position in business operation has been widely supported by previous studies(Ahern,2013;Liu&Trefler,2019),we argue that the role of network position in searching new customers or suppliers can be identified as two aspects.Firstly,it is more efficient for firms with more centralized position to collect useful business information about potential business partners,especially among markets with higher information friction(Allen,2014;Chaney,2014).Secondly,firms with higher degree of network centrality can increase their higher business reputation among and co-operation trust of potential business partners,and thus increase their reliance of business commitment and matching degree between them and new business partners.As market information in modern business has been highly relationship-specific,the influence of information friction between strangers on business operation becomes more and more important,which indicates that centralized firms have huge advantages in seeking and matching new partners.We first propose a theoretical framework for firms to search and establish new business relationships in the business network based on the work of Jackson&Rogers(2007)and Chaney(2014).Furthermore,using the data of Chinese listed firms from 2009 to 2017,this paper empirically investigates the influence of network centrality and network structure on business ties.The research results of this paper are as follows.(1)In contrast with peripheral firms of the business network,firms with higher centrality are more likely to diversify the market share of major customers using the network advantages;in the meantime,business partners located at the core of network cannot be substituted easily.(2)Shared business ties help firms to diversify the share of business partners.This role becomes more significant when the search efficiency of firms in the business network increases,shared relationship gets more intimate,the number of shared firms is larger and the similarity of shared firms is higher.However,the cost of diversification is higher when the substitutability of incumbent customers is lower and the duration of business tie is longer.(3)Network position and network structure influence firms’ability to diversify business risks in terms of intensive and extensive margin of business relationship,as well as the dynamics of business relationship which is measured by the entry of new partners and the exit of old ones.We contribute to the previous studies as follows.First,as the importance of network in information collection and sharing has been confirmed(Allen,2014;Chaney,2014;Bernard et al.,2019),we further show that firms with higher centrality are more efficient to diversify their business partners by using network advantages.Second,as previous studies focusing on the network position of firms,we further investigate the effect of three different network topology structures of firms on the diversification of large business partners’shares.Additionally,while some studies show the role of network position in business operation(Ahern,2013;Liu&Trefler,2020),we further indicate that network position also has an important impact on the dispersion of business partners.Overall,we document a positive effect of business network on the diversification of business relationship,which promotes the ability of firms to flexibly protect themselves better from operating risk of market uncertainty.
作者
包群
但佳丽
BAO Qun;DAN Jiali(School of Economics,Nankai University)
出处
《经济研究》
CSSCI
北大核心
2021年第10期189-205,共17页
Economic Research Journal
基金
国家自然科学基金面上项目(71973073)
国家社会科学基金重点项目(21AZD024)的资助。
关键词
网络地位
共享商业关系
市场风险分散
Network Centrality
Shared Business Ties
Diversification of Market Risk
