Extensive efforts have been made by both academics and practitioners to understand the inter-firm competitive relationship owing to its profound impacts on multiple key business goals, e.g., company benchmarking, marketing strategy planning, and talent acquisition. However, it has never been an easy task to fully characterize firms and assess the competitive relationship among them, mainly due to the challenge of information heterogeneity. In this regard, we propose a novel IT artifact for firm profiling and inter-firm competition assessment guided by Information System Design Theory (ISDT). We start by constructing a Heterogeneous Occupation Network (HON) using employees’ occupation details and educational attainments. Then we adopt a heterogeneous network embedding model to learn firms latent profiles (embeddings). Using the firm features and embeddings as input, we train multiple supervised classifiers to assess the competitive relationship among the firms. Following the principles of , we demonstrate the effectiveness of our IT artifact through extensive experimental studies and detailed discussions. Our research has also discovered that the occupation and education specifics of employees are key factors in identifying potential competitors of a focal firm.

中文翻译：

---

公司概况和竞争评估：设计科学方法


由于企业间的竞争关系对多个关键业务目标（例如公司基准比较、营销战略规划和人才招聘）产生深远影响，学者和实践者都做出了广泛的努力来理解企业间的竞争关系。然而，充分描述企业特征并评估企业之间的竞争关系从来都不是一件容易的事，这主要是由于信息异质性的挑战。在这方面，我们提出了一种以信息系统设计理论（ISDT）为指导的新型 IT 工件，用于公司分析和公司间竞争评估。我们首先利用员工的职业详细信息和教育程度构建异质职业网络（HON）。然后我们采用异构网络嵌入模型来学习公司的潜在特征（嵌入）。使用公司特征和嵌入作为输入，我们训练多个监督分类器来评估公司之间的竞争关系。遵循 的原则，我们通过广泛的实验研究和详细的讨论来证明我们的 IT 工件的有效性。我们的研究还发现，员工的职业和教育背景是识别焦点公司潜在竞争对手的关键因素。