Evolution of Agricultural Industry: A Social Network Perspective

• Main Authors: Hung, Kuan, 洪寬
• Other Authors: Kang, Jin-Su
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2019
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/ph9yse

碩士 === 國立交通大學 === 經營管理研究所 === 107 === The awareness-motivation-capability framework guides us on how to act or react to competitors' move, but it gives us little guidance on whom to be aware of. In particular, advanced technology development and market convergence challenge firms to identify which indirect competitors today would turn out as direct rivals. For instance, no firms in the agriculture industry 10 years ago would have expected to see IT companies as their rivals. Thus, we propose a model to identify threatening indirect competitors and apply social network analysis (i.e. temporal exponential random graph model) to account for independent competitive relations. The results show that structural holes are important network attributes to raise awareness of potential competition. Furthermore, firms need to be aware of indirect competitors up to 3 degrees of separation away as potential competitive threats.