The Empirical Study of Relationship between Product Market Competition Structure and Overvaluation

Purpose: This paper investigated the relationship between market competition and firm valuation error. Furthermore, Additional analyses were made according to the quality of financial reports and the listed market. Through the process we confirm to the impact of competition on the capital market. The purpose of this study is to analyze the impact of competition on valuation errors. The preceding studies did not provide a consistent results of the effects of competing functions on the capital market. One view is that the competition could mitigate the information asymmetry, and the other is that monopolistic lessens the manager's involvement in financial reporting. This study is intended to expand the prior study by analyzing the impact of competition on the capital market and on the valuation of investors. Research design, data, and methodology: The analysis was conducted on 12,031 samples over 11 years from 2008 to 2018 using data from market in Korea. Here the valuation error was measured by the research methodology of Rhodes-Kropf, Robinson and Viswanathan (2005), and competition measured by Herfindahl-Hirschman Index multiplied by (-1), and Concentration Ratio by (-1). Results: We confirm that the positive relationship between competition and the valuation error. In addition, we also found that the positive relation between competition and valuation error was in cases of low discretionary accruals and the KOSDAQ market. This means that the net function of competition does not mitigate valuation errors. Conclusions. This study has the following contributions when compared to prior research. First, the relevance between the level of competition and the valuation of the entity was confirmed. The study by Haw, Hu and Lee (2015) suggested that monopolistic industry of analysts' forecast is more accurate due to lower the variability in earnings. This study magnified it to confirm that monopolistic lessen information uncertainty in valuation. Second, the study on valuation errors was expanded. While the study on the effect of valuation errors on the capital market is generally relatively active, it is different that competition degree has analyzed the effect on valuation errors amid the lack of research on the effect on valuation errors.