There is a widely held belief that fierce competition improves the efficiency of production, which is clearly an extrapolation of the well-established fact that competition has a positive influence on efficient resource allocation. The intuition, which leads to this conclusion is related to the existence of a positive rent in monopolized markets and the corresponding possibilities for slack by managers and employees. Considerations of the relative propensities and of the potentials to enhance technical efficiency of the firms under different market structures resulted in a great variety of theoretical models. However, the relationships are far more complex and far less obvious than would appear at first sight.
The information environment, which provides opportunities to monitor and compare performance parameters, is likely to improve with an increase in the number of market agents. Holmstrom (1982), Nalebuff and Stiglitz (1983), and Mookherjee (1984) developed a set of arguments in favour of better managerial incentives in less concentrated markets. Hart"s (1983) model suggests that the imperfect sensitivity of managers to monetary rewards secures the positive influence of competition on managerial efforts. In particular, if the total and marginal costs are positively correlated between two types of firms (managerial and entrepreneurial) and the number of entrepreneurial firms is sufficient large to affect the market, then managers have fewer opportunities for slack. Conversely, a perfect managers" sensitivity to changes in income leads to the opposite result as was shown by Scharfstein (1988). The concept that historical performance determines the future rewards of managers, is at the core of the model of Meyer and Vickers (1997). They demonstrated that the sensitivity of managers to a positive economic rent is rather low, in particular at the beginning of their careers. The extension of this model to an n-agents framework by Nickel (as cited in Nickel, 1996) showed that managerial incentives increase with an increase in n. The theoretical model based on a principal-agent relationship suggested by Willing (1987), relates an increase in elasticity of demand to an increase in the principal"s pressure on managers. However, a corresponding decrease in individual demand for the firms has the opposite effect. In this case, the direction of the impact of competition depends on the relative magnitudes of the mentioned effects. The probability of bankruptcy, which is higher in competitive markets, can also enhance managerial efforts as described by Schmidt (1994 and 1997). At the same time, fierce competition reduces profits and might negatively influence the incentives for cost-reducing projects. Martin (1993) and Horn et al (1994) provided models where competition is associated with a reduction in managerial efforts. For instance, in Martin"s model, which is based on Cournot-type competition, marginal revenue decreases as the number of firms increases, thus the owner has fewer incentives to reward a manager for developing costsaving technologies. A number of studies (see for example, Smirlock and Marshall (1983), Dickens and Katz (1987) and Stewart (1990)) focus on the impact of competition on employee effort as well. They have shown that an increase in monopolistic rent is correlated with an increase in employee slack either directly or indirectly due to the impact on trade union activities. Finally, the peculiarities of a monopolistic market structure, which include the maintenance of entry barriers, such as excess capacities, may represent an additional source for production inefficiencies.
As for empirical evidence: the significant gap in productivity between Eastern and Western Europe, better international performance of industries subject to enhanced domestic competition (Porter 1990), and the observed productivity gains resulting from industrial deregulation, particularly in the airline industry (Graham et al 1983), provide arguments in favour of competition. At the same time, quantitative evaluation methods provide less obvious results. This can partially be attributed to methodological shortcomings. Commonly used cross-sectional data are poor tools to evaluate the various "technological opportunities, which differ substantially across industries and tend to be correlated with market concentration" (Nickell, 1996, p. 729). The use of fixed effects in panel data, like in Geroski (1990) enables to reveal a negative relationship between the level of market power and innovative activity. Nickel (1996) uses panel data and "present[s] evidence that competition" is associated with higher rates of total factor productivity growth" (p. 741). A significant number of studies of the relationship between competition and technical efficiency is based on the frontier production function technique (see Caves and Barton 1990 for a literature survey).
The East-European transition economies present an excellent opportunity for empirical studies. However, some peculiarities of these economies, like high initial economic concentration, administrative entry barriers, soft budget constraints, etc. require careful selection of the parameters of the model. Recent empirical studies on the relationship between competition and production efficiency in transition economies have produced differing results. Dutz and Vagliasindi (1999), have found that an effective competition policy results in an increase in the number of efficient market agents. Carlin et al (2001), using survey data from 25 transition countries to test the impact of competition on enterprise restructuring, found a significant, but non-monotonic effect of competition on the growth of sales and on labour productivity. At the same time, Bevan et al (1999), analysing restructuring of enterprises in transition economies, concluded that "it is unclear whether a definitive answer is likely to emerge from studies of [transition economies]" (p.13).
As it can be seen from this brief outline of theoretical and empirical findings, the argument of a positive influence of competition on production efficiency remains a topic for discussion. This paper makes an attempt to empirically test the relationship between the level of competition and technical efficiency at the sub-industry level, that is, to evaluate the anticipated disciplining effect of competition on the behaviour of entrepreneurs in the transition economy of Ukraine.
