Product Market Competition and Innovation： What Can We Learn from Economic Theory？

By means of a literature review, this paper strives to provide some clarity on the much-debated relationship between product market competition and firms＇ incentives to innovate. It shows that in the literature there does not exist a robust relationship between competition and incentives to innovate. Therefore, it would be futile to continue the debate over whether competition stimulates or hinders innovation. A more useful approach is to make a distinction between pre-innovation competition and post-innovation competition, as it provides a way for reconciling many of the seemingly contradictory findings from the literature. Another important insight from the literature is that the relationship between competition and innovation depends on the source of increased competition.

Product market competition and the disclosure of supply chain information

We investigate how product market competition affects corporate voluntary disclosure decisions,specifically regarding supply-chain information.Our results,based on a sample of manufacturing companies listed in China from 2010 to 2016,show that companies in more competitive industries disclose less customer/supplier information.The main results stand through several robustness tests.Further analyses show that the negative relationship between product market competitiveness and supply-chain information disclosure is stronger when the disclosure contains more incremental information and when competitors are more capable of gaining competitive advantage using the disclosed information.Our study contributes to the understanding of both the relationship between product market competition and voluntary disclosure decisions and the regulation of information disclosure to build a transparent capital market.