Intelligent Manufacturing, Innovation Culture, and Corporate Cost Stickiness

Abstract

Cost stickiness reflects the corporate resource allocation efficiency, such as capital, labor, and technology. Based on financial data of the listed manufacturing companies over the 2010–2020 period, this paper introduces machine learning methods, uses the word embedding model of machine learning methods to measure the development of intelligent manufacturing at the micro level, and investigates the impact of intelligent manufacturing on corporate cost stickiness and its consequences. The results show that intelligent manufacturing helps to alleviate cost stickiness and that this effect becomes more significant in an enterprise with a strong innovation culture. After replacing the major variables and testing methods, adding control variables for robustness tests, and addressing endogeneity concerns using methods such as fixed effects, instrumental variables, and propensity score matching, the above conclusions still hold. The mechanism testing reveals that technological empowerment and information empowerment are important mechanisms for intelligent manufacturing to alleviate cost stickiness. Heterogeneity tests reveal that the effect of intelligent manufacturing in alleviating corporate cost stickiness is stronger in environments characterized by high economic policy uncertainty and fierce industry competition. Drawing on informal institutional factors, this paper reveals the consequences and process through which intelligent manufacturing improves corporate resource allocation efficiency, providing insights for the transformation and upgrading of the manufacturing industry through intelligent manufacturing.

Keywords

intelligent manufacturing / cost stickiness / innovation culture / machine learning

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Higher Education Press