The Spillover Effect of Customer Digital Transformation on Enterprise Value Co-creation:Micro Evidence From The Enterprise Efficiency Perspective

As the phenomenon of digital spillover at the macro-economic level gains prominence, the impact of digital spillover generated by enterprise digital transformation at the micro-economic level is also amplified. Using the top five customer data sets of Chinese A-share listed enterprises from 2007 to 2021, this research explores the potential for customer digital spillover to foster enterprise value co-creation in supply chain, i.e., whether customer digital transformation can increase enterprise value. The benchmark tests document customer digital spillover is positively associated with enterprise value co-creation in the supply chain, and this finding holds to a battery of robustness tests. Moreover, channel tests from the perspective of enterprise efficiency indicate that customer digital spillover impacts enterprise value co-creation in the supply chain through the improvement of enterprise production efficiency, enterprise innovation efficiency, and enterprise investment efficiency. Finally, the heterogeneity tests reveal that the effect of customer digital spillover on value co-creation among enterprises is more pronounced for enterprises with the wider digital gap, the more trade credit supply, the higher financial constraints and the greater dedicated assets. Overall, this research extends prior literature on the real effects of customer digital transformation and the influencing factors of value co-creation, providing references for exploring the interactive logic among enterprises in the supply chain.