国内大市场视角下的间接网络关联与新商业关系的形成

Indirect Network Connections and the Formation of New Business Relationships in the Context of the Domestic Unified Market

在错综复杂的现代商业网络中,一个日益凸显的重要事实是大多数企业之间并不存在直接的客户-供应商关系,但通常会通过网络关联产生间接商业关联,因此,企业如何在紧密交织的商业网络中选择其商业关系,尤其是如何借助企业间的间接关联来寻找到适宜的新商业伙伴?基于2009—2017年上市公司数据,本文采用网络关联分析方法测算了商业网络下的企业关联距离,并考察了商业网络的关联强度如何帮助企业搜寻潜在的新合作伙伴,研究发现:第一,企业间的关联距离越短,建立新商业关系的概率越高,这一作用对远地理距离商业关系的构建尤其重要;第二,间接商业关联通过降低企业间信息成本和信任成本两类作用机制,促进了新商业关系的建立;第三,商业关系链条的步长距离过大时(6步以上),间接商业关联的影响变得很微弱,表明了间接商业关联只在一定距离范围内才会发挥作用。本文证实了在日益错综复杂的现代商业网络中,间接商业关联对于新商业关系建立的重要意义。

In recent years,the trend of economic globalization has reversed,leading to significant disruptions in global industrial and supply chains,and substantially increasing economic instability and uncertainty.Traditional exportoriented development models are more susceptible to major risks and external shocks.The new international environment requires China to activate and expand its domestic circulation,establish a self-regulated domestic supply and marketing network,and unleash the potential of its vast market to support economic development.The key to constructing a new development pattern lies in ensuring unobstructed economic circulation.From a micro perspective,enterprises,as microentities within a unified large market,are not isolated;direct business connections between enterprises form the fundamental units of domestic economic circulation.Without these business relationships,neither domestic nor international circulation can operate smoothly.Therefore,exploring how business relationships among enterprises are established helps further understand how to achieve smooth economic circulation and build a well-developed and effectively functioning domestic unified market.In a business environment characterized by resistance and costs,how do enterprises overcome relational costs to find suitable business partners?This paper attempts to answer this question from the perspective of networks,particularly through existing indirect network relationships.Unlike traditional small-scale commercial society,an emerging fact in the complex modern business network is that most enterprises lack direct customer-supplier relationships,but often have indirect business relationships through network links,including customers of customers,suppliers of suppliers,and shared business clients.Therefore,how enterprises choose their business relationships within a tightly intertwined business network,especially how to utilize indirect connections between enterprises to find suitable potential business partners,forms the core research issue of this study.Specifically,employing the social network analysis,this paper measures the strength of indirect business relationships among enterprises based on the reciprocal of the shortest path length within a business network,reflecting the relational distance between enterprises.Considering that indirect business relationships depend not only on current business network connections but also on past business interactions,the measured strength of indirect business relationships accumulates indirect interactions over a past period.As the time-sensitivity of business information decreases over time,it is reasonable to assume that the communicative effect of past indirect relationships diminishes over time.Therefore,the relational distance constructed based on the strength of indirect business relationships has three characteristics:Firstly,the strength of indirect business relationships between any two enterprises is inversely proportional to their shortest path length;secondly,the strength of indirect relationships at a specific point in time accumulates past strengths;thirdly,the communicative effect of past indirect relationships decreases over time.Based on data from the 2009-2017 Chinese listed company customer-supplier database,this paper uses network relational analysis to measure the relational distance in business networks and examines how the strength of business networks aids enterprises in finding potential new business relationships.The findings of this paper are as follows.Firstly,the shorter the relational distance between enterprises,the higher the likelihood of establishing new business relationships,which is particularly important for constructing business relationships over geographical distances.Secondly,indirect business relationships promote the establishment of new business relationships by reducing information and trust costs between enterprises.Thirdly,when the path length of the business relationship chain is too large(more than six steps),the effect of indirect business relationships becomes very weak,indicating that indirect business relationships only play a role within a certain distance range.This paper makes potential contributions in the following aspects.Firstly,few existing studies empirically analyze the formation process of business relationships among enterprises from a micro-network perspective.Based on detailed customer-supplier information from Chinese listed companies,this paper provides rare empirical evidence for theories on the endogenous formation of business networks.Secondly,this paper confirms the importance of indirect business relationships among enterprises.Compared with existing literature focusing on the spillover effects of one-step business relationships,this paper examines the impact of two-step and longer indirect business relationships on enterprise decisionmaking,deepening the understanding of the increasingly complex and variable business network.Lastly,this paper innovatively examines the construction and development of the domestic large circulation from the perspective of enterprise relationships,understanding the domestic large circulation through the construction of business relationships among enterprises.It finds that indirect relationships among enterprises significantly facilitate the formation of business relationships over long distances and across different administrative divisions,which is particularly important for enterprises facing market segmentation to find business partners.