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Digitalization can help suppliers cut ties with their intermediaries and offer products directly to consumers. Such a digital disintermediation strategy likely affects both digital and non-digital incumbents in ways difficult to predict by current marketing theory. In our empirical investigation of digital disintermediation in the multibillion-dollar filmed home entertainment industry, we draw on consumers' viewing behaviors before and after the launch of the streaming service Disney+. The findings show that access to Disney+ substantially increased the streaming category in the short run, accelerating the demise of non-digital linear television. However, only the new digital service benefited, while streaming incumbents suffered negative outcomes, despite public claims to the contrary. In addition to foreshadowing Netflix's subsequent difficulties in defending its leadership position, these findings offer suppliers successful ways to liberate themselves from powerful intermediaries and help incumbents brace for the competitive upheavals that a digital disintermediation strategy is likely to trigger. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an analytical review of the literature on the role of technology cycle time (TCT) in the catching-up process of latecomers at the firm, sectoral, and national levels. At the national level, latecomer economies follow a detour that consists of economic growth through specialization in short-TCT sectors during the catching-up phase, followed by a shift to long-TCT sectors in the post-catching-up phase. The paper then discusses the double-edged nature of TCT at the sectoral level, such that short TCT can either be a window of opportunity associated with the rapid obsolescence of existing technologies and thus low entry barriers, or another source of difficulty associated with the truncation of learning from existing technologies. Only latecomers with a certain absorptive capacity can benefit from short TCT as a window of opportunity. Finally, at the firm level, this paper discusses the issue of possible convergence in the behavior of catching-up firms towards those of mature firms in advanced economies. At all three levels, the keywords are detours and convergence. Given the barriers to entry in long-TCT sectors, latecomers pursue a strategy of detouring into short-TCT sectors. That is, instead of trying to emulate incumbents by entering long-TCT sectors, latecomers take the opposite route. Subsequently, as latecomers improve their capabilities over time, they shift their specialization from short to long TCT sectors, thereby achieving convergence in behavior and strategy at the firm, sectoral, and national levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under what conditions do incumbents support, tolerate, or try to rein in armed groups within their borders? The paper argues that incumbents strategize toward armed groups in ways that help them manage the ruling coalition and remain in power. I find that incumbents support armed groups in provinces where provincial politicians have defected from the ruling coalition to opposition parties, recruiting armed groups to deliver the province in national elections with fraud and violence and punish elite defectors. Where incumbents are not fighting to keep provinces in the ruling coalition, I show that they tolerate non-dissident groups that enjoy social contracts with local communities, and try to contain their dissident counterparts. Incumbents are likely to repress predatory armed groups, dissident and non-dissident alike. Doing so helps boost elite and mass support for incumbents and project central government power into the province. The argument was inductively built with comparative case studies from Nigeria and then evaluated in Kenya. The findings contribute to an important research agenda on government-armed group relationships and carry implications for security sector aid and reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The United Nations climate summits—Conferences of the Parties, or COPs—have emerged as important sites to confront fossil fuel incumbents. While new research indicates that least developed countries (LDCs) are challenging incumbents at COPs by calling upon them to phase out fossil fuel, there is limited research on how the coalition of LDCs is strategizing to confront incumbents and their capacity to do so. I address this gap by drawing on 24 interviews with LDCs' negotiators and observers. Informed by the strategic power perspective and the neo-Gramscian account of power, it identifies three central dynamics in how LDCs contest fossil fuel incumbents. First, negotiators undertake "soft" strategies at negotiations to call upon incumbents to reduce fossil fuel consumption, while observers pursue "hard" tactics at side events to press incumbents to phase out production. Second, the coalition is divided between those countries focused on reducing fossil fuel consumption versus those emphasizing the need for a production phase-out. This split creates disagreement, contestation, and division in the coalition. Finally, the coalition's capacity to confront incumbents is restrained by three obstacles: fragile strategies, varied interests and fragmentation in the coalition and the G77+ China, and interstate relations between LDCs and incumbents shaped by political economic factors and colonial legacy. The LDCs' coalition is central to advancing supply-side climate policy in international climate negotiations. Overcoming these divisions and barriers would enhance the coalition's capacity to exert pressure on incumbents, particularly major fossil fuel-producing states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the impact of government fiscal windfalls on entrepreneurship through an analysis of shocks to transfer payments in Peru. These pure transfers generate higher government spending, and we contrast the impacts on incumbent firms and entrants. Incumbent exits from the financial system are reduced, but previously troubled firms experience deteriorating performance. Increased transfers result in higher rates of firm entry into formal borrowing and superior entrant outcomes. Overall, startups outperform non-startups after heightened transfers. Plain English Summary: When local governments receive larger transfers from a national government, young firms benefit more than established incumbents. We show that local government fiscal windfalls in Peru lead to higher local government spending. Higher transfers reduce the likelihood that existing firms will stop borrowing from lenders. Higher transfers also spur greater entry into credit markets for new firms. Overall, startups outperform non-startups when transfer payments are high. Transfer payments therefore offer a powerful mechanism for governments to encourage local entrepreneurship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In yardstick competition, the availability of information pertaining to neighbouring jurisdictions is crucial for enabling voters to increase political accountability. Using a three-jurisdiction yardstick competition model and three measures of incumbent performance, the present study shows that politicians in isolated jurisdictions (i.e. ones that do not experience media spillover) are more likely to capture private rents. In contrast, in a jurisdiction connected to two neighbouring jurisdictions (i.e., ones with media spillovers), politicians are less likely to engage in rent extraction. An interesting finding is that the number of links (media spillovers) has a direct influence on status quo bias, namely that the more the voter is exposed to yardstick competition, the less status quo bias she exhibits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on the electoral legacies of civil war violence offers a puzzle. While one strand of research argues that indiscriminate rebel violence will have no effect on the electoral success of rebel-aligned parties, another argues that such violence will harden anti-rebel political attitudes in the long term. This article reconciles these conflicting predictions by examining post-conflict political attitudes over the short and medium term. We hypothesize that the organizational weaknesses that both underpin and result from indiscriminate rebel violence during civil war will constrain the vote mobilization strategies of rebel-aligned parties in post-civil war elections, eventually leading to a reversal of fortune in the medium term. We assess our hypothesis in the empirical context of the state of West Bengal in India, whose southwestern districts, collectively known as Junglemahal, experienced a spell of Maoist insurgency from 2005–2014. Taking a mixed methods approach, combining surveys across West Bengal and within Junglemahal with ethnographic research, we show that voter assessments of pre-election violence had changed sharply between the 2016 legislative assembly and 2019 parliamentary elections with violence triggering a backlash against the rebel-aligned incumbent party in 2019, but not in 2016. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What motivates elite factions to seek to replace an authoritarian incumbent? In this article, I provide a political economy theory of authoritarian replacement. I argue that high wealth inequality fosters authoritarian replacement, but that the effect is conditional on overall wealth being low. At low wealth, elite factions have an incentive to control the state to appropriate income. As wealth grows, elites shift their focus toward securing their wealth and thus prioritize finding credible commitments and stability within authoritarianism. I test these hypotheses using data from 1960 to 2008 and employ multistate survival analysis. A case study of Trujillo's rise in the Dominican Republic illustrates the mechanisms of the theory. The evidence supports the main theoretical expectation that replacement is more likely when the level of wealth is low but wealth inequality is high. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider a vertically differentiated market where an incumbent strategically wants to launch a fighter brand to thwart a new entrant. Without a credibly commitment this launch is ineffective because the incumbent always has an incentive to price the fighter brand ex-post out of the market. Endogenous price leadership with fixed or list price announcement, and dual channeling with an intermediary retailer to distribute the fighter brand are analyzed as commitment devices. The optimal mode then depends on customers' sensitivities to a deviation from the price announcement as well as on the attractiveness of the underlying market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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A majority of consumers resist switching brands when exposed to competitor sales promotions. Yet, in an effort to entice consumers to switch brands, firms spend more on sales promotions, in the form of price promotions such as discounts and coupons, than any other advertising and marketing expense. Interestingly, marketing research devotes much attention to understanding how the small subset of consumers who switch are impacted by a firm's promotional efforts, yet little attention is focused on how forgoing a competitive promotion alters a consumer's loyalty to an incumbent brand. The present research focuses on the potential unintended consequences of price promotions and demonstrates when a competitor brand's offer fails to motivate consumers to switch brands, a consumer's resistance to the promotion subsequently increases loyalty to- and spending with- their incumbent brand. Across seven studies, this research demonstrates how a competing firm's attempt to lure consumers away from a competitor's brand can strengthen loyalty for the incumbent brand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a new theoretical justification for the Cournot–Bertrand model to arise in equilibrium when firms have, at the outset, the same cost structure and sell symmetrically differentiated products. The Cournot–Bertrand model assumes some firms compete on price, adjusting their production to meet demand, while others set quantities and let their price adjust until market equilibrium is reached. We show that this may occur endogenously due to the possibility of entry, which may be deterred when some of the incumbents decide to set prices, while others free ride on this behavior and choose quantities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do dominant incumbents decline? Extant analyses of declining dominance largely focus on the erosion of technological bases of dominance. In contrast, our novel explanation focuses on the effect of geographic fragmentation on the erosion of demand-side barriers to entry and rise in strategic rivalry along the evolutionary path of the dominant incumbent's growing industry. Our theoretical setting specifies a variation in demand-side structural characteristics across and within the independent geographic sub-markets of the dominant incumbent's industry to simulate spatial and temporal variation in entry and competitive conditions. A unique unbalanced panel of independent geographic sub-markets in the US Long-distance telecommunications services industry during 1990–1996 provides the empirical setting to test a few novel hypotheses concerning the decline of a dominant incumbent under conditions of increasing geographic fragmentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the linchpins of democratic accountability runs through service quality. Because citizens are sensitive to the quality of basic services, they can translate (dis)satisfaction into assessments of incumbent politicians. Yet, although previous research has shown that both access to, and the quality of, basic services decline in rural settings, this seems not to translate into increased dissatisfaction with incumbents. In this paper we seek to understand why. We theorize four potential mechanisms that might underpin the weaker accountability for poor service outcomes in more remote settings. To test these mechanisms, we use data from 34,514 geocoded survey respondents across 19 countries in Latin America. We show that the likelihood of translating dissatisfaction with services into discontent with elected officials decreases as distance to urban centers increases. We find some evidence that a low sense of political efficacy and deference to hierarchy mediate the relationship between remoteness, service quality and accountability. Nevertheless, some of the direct relationship between distance and attitudes towards elected officials persists in the face of our mediation analysis, suggesting that more work needs to be done on the relationship between remoteness, service quality and accountability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates how political elections influence environmental quality. From this perspective, we rely on the reward-punishment hypothesis (RPH) developed by democratic accountability theories. RPH implies that legislators can be held accountable by voters for increased pollution and/or environmental disasters. Consequently, incumbent politicians tend to limit environmental degradation during election campaigns because voters may switch their political preference as punishment for such degradations. Using a panel data set of 67 developed democracies over the period 2002–2015, our estimates reveal that the environmental quality tends to improve during the periods of legislative elections mainly in non-OECD countries. Such results provide evidence of the capacity of voters to influence incumbent politicians to embrace pro-environmental behavior as legislative elections approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a new theoretical justification for entry to raise incumbent's profit. In an industry with product differentiation and when firms use different strategic variables, we show that entry by an additional price setter may end up benefitting another price setting incumbent. This is due to the response of existing quantity setters, who contract their output after entry. Such reduction in output, which creates demand for the price setters, may more than compensate the reduction in price that is brought about by entry, provided that the products are not sufficiently differentiated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The massive reallocation and restructuring triggered by the growth of large modern retailers (LMRs) have improved retail productivity worldwide. Using establishment-level census data, we examine the roles of LMRs and small stores in reallocation and productivity growth in the Korean retail trade sector. We find that retail sector productivity growth is accounted for mostly by the entry of small, productive stores. These small stores are more likely to enter counties with LMRs. Moreover, we find that the entrants in LMR counties are more productive than those elsewhere. Our finding of a complementary relationship between small and large stores contrasts with the evidence from developed countries, where retail productivity growth is explained predominantly by more productive, large entrants such as Wal-Mart displacing less productive incumbents. Plain English Summary: Large modern retailers have contributed to Korea's retail sector productivity growth by attracting the entry of productive small stores. The massive restructuring triggered by the growth of large modern retailers (LMRs) has improved retail productivity worldwide. We use establishment-level census data and examine the roles of LMRs and small stores in reallocation and productivity growth in the Korean retail trade sector. We find that retail sector productivity growth is explained mostly by the entry of small, productive stores. These small stores are more likely to enter counties with LMRs. Moreover, we find that the entrants in LMR counties are more productive than those elsewhere. Our finding suggests that the relationship between small and large stores is rather complementary than competitive. This finding is in sharp contrast with the evidence from developed countries, where retail productivity growth is explained predominantly by more productive, large entrants such as Wal-Mart displacing less productive incumbents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our paper seeks to evaluate the role of development financing institutions (DFIs) in fostering renewable energy transformations. Whereas the conventional approach to renewable energy finance emphasizes the bankability of individual projects, we advance an alternative approach for the role of DFIs in overcoming system-level constraints to enhance renewable energy transformations. We identify four constraints, namely, the incumbent entrenchment of fossil fuels, unmet energy demand of energy-intensive industries, weak production capacity of renewable energies, and lack of supporting infrastructure. We argue that DFIs can potentially address these constraints by setting a mission-driven vision, acting as honest brokers to overcome the incumbent entrenchment, scaling up renewable energy financing to make the cost of renewable energies more competitive, incubating nascent renewable energies, and financing supporting infrastructure. We then select representative DFIs to evaluate the role of DFIs in fostering renewable energy transformations. We find that most sampled DFIs have recently prioritized financing renewable energy, supported pilot projects to achieve demonstration effects, and made investments in complementary infrastructure. Yet few DFIs have achieved the economies of scale to bring down the renewable energy price or shape the policy environment in favor of renewable energy in a manner that can trigger significant transformational change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While some governments use natural resources for immediate political gain, others create transparent institutions that promote sustainable development. What explains this variation? Using novel data for Latin America between 1990 and 2019, I show that executive incumbents are more likely to restrict their discretion over natural resource revenue when public approval is high and legislative opposition is strong. When rulers are safe in their seats, they can use public funds for long-run developmental strategies, rather than short-term political survival. When there is a strong legislative opposition, rulers can signal a desire to compromise by relinquishing control over resource revenue. These findings, illustrated by the case of Mexico, suggest that a combination of high support and strong opposition provides space to create long-term fiscal policy frameworks while generating short-term incentives to do so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literature on social networks and elections has focused on predicting electoral outcomes rather than on understanding how the discussions between users evolve over time. As a result, most studies focus on a single election and few comparative studies exist. In this article, a framework to analyze Twitter conversations about the election candidates is proposed. Using DeGroot's consensus model (an assumption that all users are attempting to persuade others to talk about a candidate), this framework is useful to identify the structure and strength of connections of the mention networks on the months before an election day. It also helps to make comparisons between elections and identify patterns in different contexts. In concrete, it was found that elections in which the incumbent was running have slower convergence (more closed communities with fewer links between them) and that there is no difference between parliamentary and presidential elections. Therefore, there is evidence that the political system and the role of the incumbent in the election influences the way conversations on Twitter occur. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes incumbency contests in a large population setting. Incumbents repeatedly face different challengers, holding on to their positions until defeated in a contest. Defeated incumbents turn into challengers until they win a contest against an incumbent, thereby regaining an incumbency position. Individuals are heterogeneous as regards their payoffs from being incumbent. We consider steady-state equilibria and study how and to which extent individuals sort into the incumbency positions depending on their type. In particular, we identify sufficient conditions for positive sorting, meaning that types with higher incumbency payoffs are overrepresented among the incumbents, and show that negative rather than positive sorting may also arise in equilibrium when these conditions are violated. Further results show how incumbency rents, surplus and sorting are affected by the frequency at which incumbency is contested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How people cooperate to provide public goods is an important scientific question and relates to many societal problems. Previous research studied how people cooperate in stable groups in repeated or one-time-only encounters. However, most real-world public good problems occur in groups with a gradually changing composition due to old members leaving and new members arriving. How group changes are related to cooperation in public good provision is not well understood. To address this issue, we analyze a dataset from an online public goods game comprising approximately 1.5 million contribution decisions made by about 135 thousand players in about 11.3 thousand groups with about 234 thousand changes in group composition. We find that changes in group composition negatively relate to cooperation. Our results suggest that this is related to individuals contributing less in the role of newcomers than in the role of incumbents. During the process of moving from newcomer status to incumbent status, individuals cooperate more and more in line with incumbents. Little is known about the dynamics of human cooperation in groups with changing compositions. Using data from a large-scale and long-term online public goods game, this study shows how group changes are associated with temporarily lower cooperation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we consider a public incumbent firm who produces multiple products and a private potential foreign entrant who contemplates on entering the market. Contrary to Judd (Rand J Econ 16:153–166, 1985) that preemption of the private incumbent by overcrowding the product space is not a credible threat of intense postentry competition if the exit cost of the incumbent is low, we show that if the incumbent is a public firm who cares about consumer surplus as well, the public incumbent's preemption can credibly threaten an entrant with intense postentry competition without exiting after entry into the same location as the incumbent's. Paradoxically, entering the identical location as the incumbent does not occur in the case of a public incumbent who relatively favors entry (inducing low consumer prices), whereas entry can occur in the case of a private incumbent who does not want entry. However, we also show that the incumbent can encourage entry by choosing its locations to leave enough room for the entrant so that the entrant can profitably enter locations far from the incumbent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior research suggests that corporate corruption culture captures an audit client's general attitude towards opportunistic behavior. In this paper, we examine whether the relation between client corruption culture and audit quality is attenuated or exacerbated by the competitive position of the incumbent auditor in the local audit market. We find that the incumbent auditor's weak competitive position in the local audit market exacerbates the negative effects of client corruption culture on audit quality. By the same token, we show that the incumbent auditor's strong competitive position in the local audit market attenuates the adverse audit quality effects associated with client corruption culture. Our findings speak to the interplay between client corruption culture and the competitive position of the incumbent auditor in US local audit markets and is of potential interest to regulators concerned about the impact of client corruption culture and audit market competition on audit quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's "economic juggernaut" is often noted to have arisen from successful market reforms carried out in the context of high state capacity. In contrast, we demonstrate that crucial reforms to replace central planning with markets have stalled as a result of major barriers of two types: institutional and ideational. Focusing on the electricity sector, we find that market reforms pushed by China's central government are hindered by deep inefficiencies that arise from the legacy plan and "plan-derived" institutions of subnational governments and grid companies, against which the central state has been largely ineffective. We also uncover fascinating ideational differences of the nature and purpose of "markets" that show how they often are envisioned more as a way to extend the planner's "toolbox," or to offer "salvation" for ailing incumbent firms, rather than to induce efficiency. Our empirical focus on three prominent types of "market-oriented" experiments in the electric power sector demonstrate clear limits to state capacity, limits that emanate from state actors rather than merely industry, despite high-priority central government goals of increasing efficiency, integrating renewable energy, and reducing emissions from the electricity sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent democratic regressions and crises suggest democracy is at risk across East and Southeast Asia. One of the factors that can determine democratic stability are citizens' attitudes. While previous research has concentrated on support for democracy-in-principle, this contribution argues that it is political trust, i.e. support for democracy-in-practice, which is crucial for democratic stability. For democracies to be stable, political trust should be high as well as rooted in long-term factors like liberal democratic value orientations or social trust to protect it from short-term fluctuations following economic crises or political scandals. This contribution therefore examines not only the current levels and development of political trust but also whether it is influenced more by long-term factors (liberal democratic value orientations, social trust) or short-term factors (economic performance evaluations, incumbent support). The empirical analysis shows political trust in five East and Southeast Asian democracies (Indonesia, Japan, Mongolia, South Korea, Taiwan) to be mostly mediocre and primarily dependent on economic performance evaluations and incumbent support. Among the five democracies, citizens in Japan appear most resilient to democratic regressions; on the other hand, Taiwanese democracy seems least equipped to master future crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding the dynamics of stability and change is key to accelerate sustainability transitions. This paper aims to advance and inspire sustainability transition research on this matter by collecting insights from interpretative environmental discourse literature. We develop a heuristic that identifies and describes core discursive elements and dynamics in a socio-technical system. In doing so, we show how the interplay of meta-, institutionalized, and alternative discourses, dominant, marginal, and radical narratives, as well as weak and strong discursive agency influence the socio-technical configuration. The heuristic suggests three discursive lock-ins reinforcing the stabilization of socio-technical systems: unchallenged values and assumptions, incumbents' discursive agency, and narrative co-optation. Furthermore, it explores three pathways of discursive change: disruptive, dynamic and cross-sectoral. Overall, this paper puts forward a discursive perspective on sustainability transitions. It offers additional analytical approaches and concepts for discursive transition studies, elaborated insights on the dynamics within and between the analytical dimensions of a socio-technical system, as well as a theoretical baseline for analyzing discursive lock-in mechanisms and pathways of discursive change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In merger enforcement, entry is considered to be a factor that potentially can mitigate otherwise anti-competitive effects of a merger. The current framework for entry analysis evaluates whether potential entrants are likely to have the incentives and ability to enter the industry under the conditions of elevated profitability that are created by an anti-competitive merger. Missing from entry analysis is the notion that incumbent firms may proactively deter entry and how such incumbent incentives may change as a result of a merger. By modeling entry as the outcome of a game between incumbents and potential entrants, we show that a merger can reduce the likelihood of entry even at elevated profit levels by increasing incumbent incentives to invest in entry deterrence. The paper has two policy implications for merger enforcement: First, a merger that is benign by traditional measures may nonetheless have the effect of reducing future entry—entry that would have made the market more competitive relative to status quo. Second, evidence of recent historical entry—which is an important criterion that is used to assess the likelihood of post-merger entry—may be of less evidentiary value than is considered under the current merger enforcement policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An emerging body of evidence suggests a causal relationship between wellbeing and incumbent voting. However, the evidence is primarily founded upon established democracies with regular turnovers of power. Moreover, the mechanism underlying this relationship is still relatively unknown. Using the intricacies of the Malaysian political context and Malaysian data from the seventh wave of the World Values Survey (WVS), this study examines the mediating role of trust in government to explain the relationship between life satisfaction and incumbent voting. Notably, the Malaysian WVS was concluded two weeks before Malaysia's fourteenth general election (GE14), which witnessed the end of the ruling coalition's six-decade hold on power since independence and subsequently ushered in the country's first-ever peaceful transfer of power. The empirical analysis indicated that the mediating role of trust in the relationship between life satisfaction and incumbent voting is supported. Further empirical analysis also showed that the mediating effect of trust was unique to the GE14 context compared to GE13, thus providing a better understanding of the role trust plays in the outcome of the election. The results provide valuable insights and implications in political science, especially for a nation emerging from its authoritarian state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous literature has shown that voters’ biased beliefs regarding policy outcomes incentivize the selection of seemingly better, but socially worse, policies. It has also shown that voters’ tendency to gauge an incumbent’s competence by the present state of the economy (retrospective voting) could counteract biased beliefs. In this article, we argue that, when the advantageous consequences of a measure of policy only accrue with considerable lag (the down-up problem), retrospective voting instead amplifies the effects of biased beliefs. Still, we find that it may nevertheless be optimal for an incumbent to select good long-term policies if the incumbent is strongly motivated by the success of the chosen policies. Finally, we investigate the robustness of these conclusions by considering an incumbent bias, limited accountability, and the introduction of incentive and threshold contracts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider a market structure with three mobile providers, two of which are vertically integrated with nationwide coverage. The third provider (an entrant) invests in partial coverage and needs to rent access from one of its rivals. Competition between the vertically integrated providers in the access market may drive them to offer an access price structure that benefits the entrant. For a given level of the access price, the entrant benefits from an access price structure that reduces its need to invest. If asymmetric regulation is imposed whereby only one of the vertically integrated firms (the incumbent) face restrictions on which access price structure it can offer, the access price could be higher than in an unregulated economy. This provides a cautionary tale for competition authorities as well as sector-specific regulators, both of which typically only impose restrictions on the incumbent. The paper is motivated by the Norwegian mobile market, where the competition authorities imposed a fine of 78 million euros on Telenor (the dominant incumbent) for allegations of the abuse of market power by changing the access price structure and thereby hampering an entrant's investment incentives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider a resource allocation problem where a decision maker (DM) is to distribute a certain budget among alternative projects in order to create the best portfolio. The DM aims to generate a portfolio with (1) a high return and (2) a balanced distribution of resources among categories. We assume that the DM has a quasiconcave value function and provides no explicit value for the target distribution of resources over categories. We develop an interactive approach that requires the DM to make pairwise comparisons among alternative portfolios. We present the developed approach on an illustrative example and conduct an extensive computational experiment. In majority of the instances, the incumbent solution proposed by the algorithm is either equal or very close to the best solution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent world-wide trend of female chief executives struggling to maintain public support while facing corruption allegations and scandals poses the question of whether female politicians face stronger backlash for corruption than their male counterparts. Even though corruption scandals and allegations are not exclusive to countries led by female incumbents, notable figures such as former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff and former Chilean President Michele Bachelet seem to have experienced more dramatic drops in public support when targeted by corruption allegations in comparison to male incumbents from their region. This paper tests whether beliefs about women's higher honesty and purity can lead voters to punish perceived transgressions by female politicians more harshly than when those are performed by men. Using survey-experiments conducted in Brazil and Mexico, the analyses find support for the gender-related backlash in Mexico and no evidence for it in Brazil. However, the backlash observed in Mexico is not larger among subjects holding views about women as less corrupt than men. Overall, the results suggest that the differential gender-related backlash against incumbents depends on individual and contextual-level factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Expected improvement (EI), a function of prediction uncertainty σ (x) and improvement quantity (ξ - y ^ (x)) , has been widely used to guide the Bayesian optimization (BO). However, the EI-based BO can get stuck in sub-optimal solutions even with a large number of samples. The previous studies attribute such sub-optimal convergence problem to the "over-exploitation" of EI. Differently, we argue that, in addition to the "over-exploitation", EI can also get trapped in querying samples with maximum σ (x) but poor objective function value y (x) . We call such issue as "over-exploration", which can be a more challenging problem that leads to the sub-optimal convergence rate of BO. To address the issues of "over-exploration" and "over-exploitation" simultaneously, we propose to calibrate the incumbent ξ adaptively instead of fixing it as the present best solution in the EI formulation. Furthermore, we propose two calibrated versions of EI, namely calibrated EI (CEI) and recalibrated EI (REI), which combine the calibrated incumbent ξ Calibrated with distance constraint to enhance the local exploitation and global exploration of promising areas, respectively. After that, we integrate EI with CEI & REI to devise a novel BO algorithm named as CR-EI. Through tests on seven benchmark functions and an engineering problem of airfoil optimization, the effectiveness of CR-EI has been well demonstrated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate how the emergence of fintech start-ups and their financing is shaped by regional knowledge creation and lack of trust in financial services incumbents across 21 OECD countries, 226 regions and over the 2007–2014 period. We find that knowledge generated in the IT sector is much more salient for fostering new fintech start-ups than knowledge generated in the financial services sector. Additionally, the importance of new knowledge created in the financial services sector (IT sector) increases (decreases) as fintech start-ups grow and seek financing. When the level of trust in financial services incumbents falls within a region, this is followed by an increase in the financing provided to fintech start-ups. Nevertheless, regions with historically low average levels of trust in financial services incumbents attract less fintech investment overall. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The knowledge spillover theory of entrepreneurship (KSTE) seeks to explain the mechanisms of how uncommercialized knowledge can be turned into new to market products. This paper uses a large unbalanced panel of 16,542 UK firms constructed from six consecutive waves of a community innovation survey and annual business registry survey during 2002–2014 to test the differences in the returns to knowledge spillover for innovation between start-ups and incumbent firms. The theoretical, managerial, and policy implications of the study are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disruptive strategies have only been studied in stable environments. To overcome this limitation, this article aims to show through an in-depth study of the main actors in the yoghurt industry in Algeria that these strategies are possible in a dynamic environment. This research was carried out on the basis of an exploratory qualitative study. We have focused our efforts on two types of players, including new entrants and incumbent businesses. Our results show that the strong factors of the competitive dynamics pushed companies and industries to undertake disruptive innovation, which strategy became an indispensable element to survive and succeed for all the actors in the industry. Overall, our study indicates that the link between the competitive dynamics and disruptive innovation is not only in need of, but is deserving of, more consideration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing accounts of centralized candidate selection argue that party elites tend to ignore constituent preferences in favor of internal party concerns, leading to accountability deficits. Yet this claim has been largely assumed rather than demonstrated. We provide the first detailed empirical analysis of the relationship between constituent opinion and candidate nominations in the absence of party primaries. We study contemporary South Africa, where conventional wisdom suggests that parties select candidates primarily on the basis of party loyalty. Analyzing more than 8000 local government councillor careers linked with public opinion data, we find that citizen approval predicts incumbent renomination and promotion in minimally competitive constituencies, and that this relationship becomes more pronounced with increasing levels of competition. By contrast, improvements in service provision do not predict career advancement. Under threat of electoral losses, South Africa's centralized parties strategically remove unpopular incumbents to demonstrate responsiveness to constituent views. However, party-led accountability may not improve development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are voters in democracies more competent if there are more media outlets? To answer this question, I provide a game-theoretic model of media capture and political persuasion in democratic countries. In the model, there are two politicians, the Incumbent and the Challenger. They co-opt the media by offering them access to information. In exchange, the media support politicians who are available for interviews or include journalists in press pools. Voters choose like-minded media. I show that if the Incumbent is sufficiently popular, then media bias in her favor weakly increases in the number of media outlets. Otherwise, media bias in the Incumbent's favor weakly decreases in the number of media outlets. The welfare of voters weakly increases and decreases in the respective cases. The intuition is that, in equilibrium, the Incumbent can co-opt only one media outlet and ensure that enough voters read it. In this case, media outlets compete for access to the Incumbent and agree for a higher bias as their number increases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does the targeted spending of public resources provide electoral benefits for incumbents? Despite the attention of scholars to that question, the empirical results are mixed thus far. The present paper supplies insights into the electoral benefits of discretionary funding on local elections. I study the consequences of pork-barrel politics in 7355 competitive mayoral elections in Slovakia between 2006 and 2018, finding that more grants from the central government enhance the likelihood of mayors winning reelection. The same advantage applies to mayors whose municipalities receive grants in local election years. The effects of the number of grants obtained as well as the timing of their distribution are, however, moderated by municipal population. More specifically, a larger number of grants and resources obtained near the end of the mayoral term provides electoral benefits only to small town mayors but give no advantage to the mayors of larger urban areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the impact of the COVID-19 lockdown on aggregate employment in Belgium. To this end, we use microdata of all Belgian firms and apply a machine learning-based approach to simulate the impact of the lockdown on employment growth under various economic scenarios. In doing so, we distinguish between start-ups and incumbent firms with both short and long-term effects. In the short term, we expect to see significant losses of employment coming mainly from mature incumbent firms. In the long term, the missing generation of start-ups formed during the lockdown will have a significant and growing effect of slowing down the employment growth even a decade after the lockdown. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As numerous studies in the US and elsewhere document, voters often hold incumbents accountable for recent economic circumstances. However, our knowledge of the conditions that allow voters to do so remains incomplete. In particular, most findings about economic voting come from studies of modern economies (post World War II). Modern economies have a host of characteristics that seem to lend themselves to economic voting. Their governments play a large role in the economy and have the Keynesian toolset necessary to influence the economy. Their voters are educated and have access to detailed economic data from ubiquitous media. Are these and other modern conditions necessary for economic voting? Would voters still hold politicians accountable even under adverse conditions? Using economic measures now available back to the 1790s, we study economic voting from the earliest days of the US Republic when none of these conditions were met. Voters, we find, appear to judge incumbent presidents on the economy all the way back to George Washington. Consistent with this pattern, we also find that the economy appears to shape presidents' decisions to run again throughout US history. These findings support recent comparative evidence that economic voting is pervasive across a variety of contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I present a model of repeated electoral competition between two parties. A part of the electorate votes retrospectively and considers the amount of rent-seeking by the incumbent party, while the prospective voters follow probabilistic party preferences when casting their votes. I show that it is possible to distinguish the effects of incumbency advantage and electoral punishment on the minimum level of rent-seeking consistent with equilibrium. As long as there is electoral punishment for excessive rent-seeking, a larger incumbency advantage increases accountability by decreasing the minimum amount of rent-seeking consistent with equilibrium. The reason for this is that the larger the incumbency advantage is, the more important the result of the next election for all future election outcomes is. Consequently, the incumbent party is willing to give up more rent-seeking opportunities to improve its electoral prospects. Increased accountability due to a larger share of retrospective voters hurts the political selection aspect of elections because it enables the incumbent party to win without the support of the majority of the prospective voters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A multiproduct incumbent firm faces the threat of entry from another multiproduct (generalist) firm or from single-product (specialist) firms. Assuming that the incumbent offers higher quality products than its rivals, we inquire whether the possibility of bundling by the incumbent is more effective in deterring entry in one setting or the other, and explore how the quality difference affects the comparison. For instance, for relatively high-quality differences the generalist is more vulnerable to bundling than are the specialists; but bundling is a credible action for the incumbent more often against specialists than against the generalist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyze the non-contributory health insurance program ("green cards") in Turkey with RDD (Regression Discontinuity Design) and show that more citizens receive green cards in municipalities controlled by the national incumbent party, AKP (Adalalet ve Kalkınma Partisi). Our explanation for the finding emphasizes the role of local party organizations and sub-national incumbency. Local government control provides additional resources to the party to strengthen its organization, which then helps the party to target the beneficiaries of central government programs like green cards more effectively. Theoretically, we join the literature that uncovers the significance of incorporating local actors into the analysis of central government programs. Our contribution lies in depicting the mediating role of political parties and their local organizations. Even in a highly centralized context like Turkey, parties' informal role affects program implementation. Unequal access to free healthcare results from the asymmetry between national and opposition parties in how their local organizations interact with the central government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We demonstrate that more intense competition in games with production and negative externalities may be payoff-improving, and therefore welcomed by incumbents. In games that feature equilibria with strategic complements, increased competition may give rise to a new equilibrium where aggregate effort is lower, and the resulting reduced levels of externalities ultimately leaves all players better off. This setting applies to models of Cournot oligopoly, of common pool resources, and contests with endogenous prizes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital transformation (DT) is a major challenge for traditional companies. Despite the term, DT is relatively new; its substance is not: a whole stream of research has examined the relationship between DT and firm performance with contradictory findings. Most of these studies have chosen a linear correlational approach, however, did not analyze the holistic interplay of DT dimensions, leading to firm performance. This applies especially to the mature financial services industry and the future perspectives of traditional financial service providers (FSP). Hence, it remains an open question for both research and practice what DT configurations have a positive impact on firm performance. Against this background, the aim of this exploratory study is to examine how DT dimensions are systemically connected to firm performance of incumbent FSP. Drawing on a qualitative-empirical research approach with case data from 83 FSP, we identify digital configurations along different levels of firm performance. Our findings suggest an evolution of digital configurations of FSP, leading to five empirical standard types from which only one managed to establish a profound basis of DT. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Civil societies are usually seen as facilitators of democracy or as oppositional powers withstanding authoritarian rule. However, more and more often civil society organizations (CSOs) appear to contribute to the legitimacy of non-democratic incumbents. Taking the example of contemporary Russia, this paper argues that state funding for CSOs under authoritarian regime conditions serves for securing regime legitimacy in two respects—by supporting CSOs contribution to public welfare and by transmitting state-led legitimacy discourse to the civil society sector. The analysis of applications submitted between 2013 and 2016 to the Presidential Grant Competition (PGC), the biggest public funding programme for CSOs in Russia, shows that the state is (1) supporting CSO activities above all in social, health and education-related fields, and (2) privileging projects that relate to a state-led conservative public discourse not only but foremost within those welfare-related fields. These results highlight the importance of investigating state support to CSOs in order to access the changing role of civil society under authoritarian regime conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In light of important limitations in using observed contribution behavior or surveys to assess how donors respond to candidate issue positions, we present novel experimental evidence about how habitual donors (individuals who contribute above average amounts, multiple times, and in consecutive elections) respond to candidate issue positions. Using a vignette design, we provide causal evidence about the support for two types of divergence from typical candidate issue position bundles—being too extreme or bipartisan. We show "typical" candidates outperform all others in terms of likelihood of attracting donations, primary votes, and general election votes. We also find that donors' responsiveness to positions vis-à-vis a non-donor sample is not solely driven by partisan intensity and key demographics (i.e., high educated, high income, age, etc.). These results provide evidence that party-consistent positioning among candidates and incumbents may be reinforced by donors' opposition to issue positions that diverge from the party-standard. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Should there be limits on startup acquisitions by dominant firms? Efficiency requires that startups sell their technology to the right incumbents, that they develop the right technology, and that they invest the right amount in R&D. In a model of differentiated oligopoly, we show distortions along all three margins if there are no limits on startup acquisition. Leading incumbents make acquisitions partially to keep lagging incumbents from catching up technologically. When startups can choose what kind of technology they invent, they are biased toward inventions that improve the leader's technology rather than those that help the laggard incumbent catch up. Further, upon obtaining a pure monopoly, the leading incumbent's marginal willingness to pay for new technologies falls abruptly, which diminishes private returns on future innovations. We consider antitrust measures that could mitigate these problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]