“…In peripheral cities, given the relative backwardness of the soft environment such as the institutional environment and policy preferences, the development of DE may accelerate the flow of all kinds of factors from the peripheral cities to the central city, thus generating the "siphon effect" phenomenon, leading to the "Matthew effect" (i.e., "the weaker is weaker, the stronger is stronger"), further distorting the allocation of factors, and impeding the enhancement of the performance of urban EWP (Cui et al, 2023). However, with the rising level of DE development in cities, DE development can effectively reduce the cost of searching, trading, matching, and copying by alleviating information asymmetry (Xue and Li, 2022), thus reducing the transaction barriers, breaking the market boundary, and expanding the scope of the market, which is conducive to the flow of factors in a larger space, and optimizing the distortion of factor allocation (Qu et al, 2023). Moreover, the DE can replace and eliminate the traditional backward industries with high pollution and high energy consumption through the substitution effect, and it can apply new technologies to empower and improve the efficiency of traditional industries through the empowerment effect, thus giving rise to new industries, new business forms, and new modes, opening up new channels for factor flows, enhancing the efficiency of factor allocation, and thus improving the performance of urban EWP (Bao et al, 2023).…”