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Chinese Journal of Management Science ›› 2025, Vol. 33 ›› Issue (8): 75-89.doi: 10.16381/j.cnki.issn1003-207x.2022.2294

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Competitive Network and Financial Performance: Empirical Evidence Based on Explainable Random Forest

Jianxin Zhu(), Kexin Liu, Nengmin Zeng, Xiong Wu   

  1. School of Economics and Management,Harbin Engineering University,Key Laboratory of Big Data and Business Intelligence Technology (Harbin Engineering University),Ministry of Industry and Information Technology,Harbin 150001,China
  • Received:2022-10-25 Revised:2024-01-10 Online:2025-08-25 Published:2025-09-10
  • Contact: Jianxin Zhu E-mail:zhjx@vip.163.com

Abstract:

The significance of the competitive network position as a key factor in firms' strategic decision-making and its impact on financial performance is the focus of this study. First, using China's property insurance industry from 2008 to 2019 as the research subject, a Random Forest model is constructed to investigate the predictability of competitive network characteristics and market structure characteristics. Next, the importance of competitive network and market structure is analyzed using the feature importance evaluation method of the Random Forest model. Finally, the nonlinear functional relationship between these important features and financial performance is revealed using SHAP values and further the causal relationship between key competitive network features and financial performance is verified using traditional econometric models (Propensity Score Matching). It also explores the differences between nonlinear and linear model results.The research findings show that (1) Overall, the absence of either competitive network or market structure features can reduce the fitting performance of the enterprise financial performance model, with the impact of missing competitive network features being more pronounced. (2) In terms of the ranking of feature importance, competitive network features account for approximately 30% of the importance to enterprise financial performance, significantly higher than the importance of market structure features. Key features within competitive network include: individual network size, intermediary frequency, and closeness centrality. (3) These three key features follow a power-law distribution with respect to enterprise financial performance, and the existence of a strong causal relationship between important competitive network features and financial performance was verified through propensity score matching. The conclusions of this paper enrich the research outcomes in the field of competitive networks and financial performance, providing support for them, and offer a new solution for causal analysis and verification between high-dimensional, nonlinear factors.

Key words: competitive network, financial performance, random forest, SHAP model

CLC Number: