Research on the Impact of Enterprise Intelligence on Commercial Credit Acquisition: Mechanism, Heterogeneity and Empirical Test

Abstract

This study explores the impact of enterprise intelligence on trade credit acquisition, as well as its boundary conditions and underlying mechanisms. This study takes Chinese A-share listed companies from 2010 to 2023 (excluding the financial, real estate, software and information technology service industries) as the research sample, measures trade credit acquisition by the proportion of accounts payable plus notes payable to total assets, and characterizes enterprise intelligence from three dimensions: Overall intelligence (AI), intelligence intensity (AIint, the natural logarithm of the frequency of AI-related keywords plus 1), and intelligence type (AItype, the natural logarithm of the category of AI-related keywords plus 1).

The empirical results show that: (1) Enterprise intelligence significantly promotes the acquisition of trade credit - compared with non-intelligent enterprises, the trade credit obtained by intelligent enterprises (relative to total assets) increases by 0.9 percentage points; There are also significant positive effects on intelligence intensity and type, with coefficients of 0.0054 and 0.0058 respectively (both significant at the 1% level). (2) Asset specificity has a positive moderating effect: Higher asset specificity enhances the positive impact of enterprise intelligence on trade credit acquisition (the interaction term coefficient AI×ASI is 0.0423, which is significant at 1%). (3) Heterogeneity analysis indicates that the promoting effect is more prominent in high-tech enterprises, executive teams with high financial backgrounds, and enterprises in the growth/maturity stage. (4) Mechanism tests have confirmed that enterprise intelligence promotes the acquisition of trade credit through three paths: optimizing business quality (increasing patent applications and R&D investment), enhancing production efficiency (improving total factor productivity), and reducing high-risk events (lowering the risk of bankruptcy).