“…In such a market, as suggested by the theory of monopolistic competition, firms have little to no control over the market price and, as such, compete on the basis of product differentiation. Consequently, to improve profitability and to compete in the market, managers have to resort to strategies like mergers, acquisitions, improving operational cost efficiency, asset and liabilities diversification, and increasing non-interest revenue (Andrieş and Căpraru 2014). There are many other notable studies on competition in banking (for example, Yüksel et al 2016Yüksel et al , 2018Dinçer and Yüksel 2018;Dinçer et al 2019).…”