Abstract

This article contributes to the development of contestable market theory by investigating how competitiveness in the eSports industry influences the size of this industry, as measured by the volume of monetary prizes. We use data on each gamer's prize earnings for each tournament from 1999 to 2015 to estimate panel vector autoregression (V.A.R.) model with fixed effects. The main finding is that competition does not increase industry size. This result confirms the hypothesis from the contestable market theory that perfect competition does not always facilitate better development, especially in industries where natural barriers result in a small number of leading firms or teams.

摘要

本文通过调查电子竞技行业的竞争力如何影响该行业的规模（以金钱奖励的数量来衡量），为可竞争市场理论的发展做出了贡献。我们使用 1999 年至 2015 年每场比赛中每位玩家的奖金收入数据来估计具有固定效应的面板向量自回归 (VAR) 模型。主要发现是竞争不会增加行业规模。这一结果证实了可竞争市场理论的假设，即完全竞争并不总是促进更好的发展，尤其是在自然壁垒导致少数领先企业或团队的行业中。