Peer Effect of Digital Transformation Level between Start-ups and Firms
There is an endogenous interaction between corporate decisions.When making decisions,companies will learn,respond,and counterattack the decision-making behaviors of peers.To attain sustainable competitive advantages,firms must accurately grasp future market trends,understand the positions of competitors,and continuously cultivate and develop the firms'core capabilities based on a comprehensive assessment of its own resources.Digital transformation is ac-companied by high technology costs and reconstruction costs of organizations,processes,and business models.Peer compa-nies operate within similar market and institutional environments.Therefore,the digital transformation of peer companies can be used as a reference for firms'digital transformation decisions.New ventures,as digital disruptor,with a high level of digital transformation,will reconstruct the original market position and bring the digital transformation urgency to firms.Digital transformation provides a unique context for this article to explore more deeply the complex interactions between new ventures and existing firms.Based on the background presented above,this paper aims to investigate the influence and mechanisms of peer new ventures'digital transformation on firms'digital transformation.Taking Chinese A-share listed companies from 2009 to 2021 as samples,this paper uses the two-way fixed effect model to control both the firm-year fixed effect and industry-year fixed effect,so as to alleviate the inconsistency of estimation re-sults caused by missing factors that do not change over time at the industry level.The key research motivation of this paper is to observe the impact of new ventures'digital transformation on the level of firms'digital transformation.The research contributions of this paper are as follows.Compared with the previous litera-ture on peer effect,the biggest contribution is the selection of in the group sample.This article uses the potential digital dis-ruption brought about by the digital transformation of new start-ups as a potential competitive threat to predict the digital transformation behavior of firms,thereby expanding peer effects and related research in the field of innovation and entrepre-neurship.In addition,this paper also extends the drivers of enterprise digital transformation to the peer level.This article re-gards the digital disruption brought about by the digital transformation of peer start-ups as a competitive threat to firms and provides new insights into the motivations of firms'digital transformation from industry horizontal factors.Furthermore,this article provides new empirical evidence on the peer effect mechanism of peer new ventures on firms'digital transformation.The competition mechanism test in this article adds enterprise-level variables that are more relevant to the characteristics of new ventures,so it can explore the competition mechanism between new ventures and their peers in more detail.Con-sidering that there may be deficiencies in the quality of information disclosure of new ventures,different from previous examinations of peer effects on information mechanisms,this article expands related research on the examination of informa-tion mechanisms on peer effects from the perspective of information disclosure quality.The research results of this article find that the higher the digital transformation level of new ventures in the industry,the more conducive it is to promote the improvement of the digital transformation level of peer companies.This conclusion remains robust after using alternative variable measures,excluding industry common shocks,and overcoming a series of endogeneity problems.The results of the mechanism test show that the impact of peer start-ups'digital transformation on firms'digital transfor-mation is driven by both the competition mechanism and the information mechanism.The results of the competition mecha-nism show that when the strategic similarity between peer start-ups and firms are higher,and the industry competition are more intense,firms are more likely to be affected by peer start-ups.Regarding to the information mechanism,when the quali-ty of information disclosure by new start-ups is higher and the quality of industry information disclosure is higher,that is,when the quality of information supply is higher,the level of firms'digital transformation will be more significantly affected by new start-ups in the same industry.When the uncertainty of the industry environment is higher,that is,when the informa-tion needs of firms are higher,the peer effect between peer start-ups and firms in digital transformation decisions will be stronger.
digital transformationstart-upinformation mechanismcompetition mechanismspeer effect
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