Politician turnover, policy uncertainty and competitive dynamics : an empirical study of real estate industry = 官员更替、政策不确定性和动态竞争：以房地产行业为例

Abstract

Competitive dynamics is obviously different from traditional industrial structure analysis because it focuses on the actual competitive behaviors of enterprises in reality. Competitive dynamics has become the core topic in the field of strategic management. The existing research has explored a lot about how and when enterprises conduct competitive behaviors. The existing literature argues that the actions and responses of firms depend on three elements: 1) the characteristics of attackers; 2) The characteristics of the defender and 3) the characteristics of competitive actions. In this sense, the existing research on dynamic competitive behavior focuses on the dual level of focus firm and its competitors. However, the competition of enterprises is not in a vacuum, but embedded in a larger institutional environment. A large number of studies in the field of strategic management have demonstrated that the institutional environment has an important impact on the competitive strategy of enterprises. However, it is surprise that little attention has been paid to how the institutional environment affects the dynamic competitive behaviors of enterprises. This article joins this theoretical dialogue and aims to make up for the defects in theoretical research. This study argues that the institutional environment has an important impact on the competitive dynamics of enterprises. This study focuses on one of the most important factors in China's institutional environment, the impact of politician turnover on firm’s competitive behaviors. This study proposes that politician turnover will increase the information asymmetry between the government and enterprises, thereby increasing policy uncertainty. This kind of policy uncertainty will affect the competitive behaviors of enterprises. In addition, the political connection of enterprises and the development of regional market intermediaries can effectively alleviate this information asymmetry and reduce the impact of official turnover on policy uncertainty. Specifically, this study takes China's real estate industry as an example, focusing on the impact of the turnover of municipal party secretaries on the land acquisition behavior of real estate enterprises. The study found that when the municipal party secretary changes, the policy uncertainty will increase, and real estate enterprises will hoard more land to deal with this uncertainty. Political connections and effective market intermediaries can alleviate this effect. This study includes seven chapters. The first chapter is the introduction, which describes the research background and research question. The second chapter is literature review, which reviews the competitive dynamics, politician turnover and policy uncertainty in detail. The third chapter describes the development history of China's real estate industry, the characteristics of China's real estate industry and the typical competitive strategies of real estate enterprises. The fourth chapter is an empirical study, which examines the impact of politician turnover on the competitive behavior of real estate enterprises. The fifth chapter is the research method, which introduces the data, samples and measurement methods of this study. The sixth chapter is the research results. The seventh chapter is a discussion, which summarizes the theoretical and practical implications, limitations and future research directions.