The Community Structure of Competitive Pressure Networks for Multimarket Industries

Both the product oriented competitor identification method and the two-firm based multi-point competition analysis have their shortcomings in the analysis of the overall competition in a multi-market industry. This paper assumes it is possible that in some multi-market industry, firms are competing in communities (or groups). Based on the notion of competitive pressure and the community structure approach in complex network study, this paper tries to propose a method in detecting the community structure in an industry so as to find out firms and products (submarket) that should be considered in competition strategy research.