竞争型城际关系的量化逻辑与模拟方法探索

Intercity competitive and cooperative relationships provide crucial lenses for understanding the structure, processes, and dynamics of urban systems. While existing studies have explored the network structure of cooperative intercity relationships and offered case analyses of competition between cities, there remains a relative scarcity of quantitative research on the competitive dimension. Building on a review of domestic and international research on competitive intercity dynamics, this study adopts a firm-centric approach to propose a quantitative framework for analyzing competitive intercity relationships. Drawing on multidisciplinary measures of competitive relationships, this framework aims to quantify intercity competition through "structure + scale" similarities and market niche overlap while accounting for the asymmetry of competition. Theoretically, this framework integrates place-based perspectives, which focus on similarities in city attributes, with network-based perspectives that emphasize positional similarities within flow structures. This captures intercity competition in both resource aggregation and external linkages. Methodologically, a bipartite "firm-city" matrix is constructed, applying distance and similarity measures from ecology and management sciences, enabling the identification of both "structure + scale" and market competition within the same dataset while ensuring measurement reliability. Finally, the study applies this method to measure the competitive relationships among cities in the Yangtze River Delta region, using data from innovative enterprises, which effectively validates the proposed method. Overall, the study provides a methodological framework for deeper exploration of intercity competition and encourages urban systems and urban network research to place greater emphasis on this critical dimension.