Abstract: In the process of China's economy transitioning towards high-quality development, involution-style competition has become a crucial issue that hinders the improvement of resource allocation efficiency and the breakthrough of technological innovation momentum. The construction of a unified national market provides a systematic solution for governing the involution-style competition. Based on the population competition model, this paper analyzes how institutional rigidity under market segmentation gives rise to technology lock-in, investment surges, and homogeneous competition. It provides a systematic analytical framework for involution-style competition governance from the perspective of building a unified national market. Research has found that institutional rigidity under market segmentation compresses the ecological niche space of technology populations, distorts factor flows, and amplifies institutional arbitrage behavior, forcing enterprises to fall into the dilemma of excessive competition and capacity expansion. The construction of a unified national market promotes the transition of competition paradigm from price game to multidimensional innovation through releasing the carrying capacity of technology populations, promoting diversified market competition, and activating the free flow of factors. To promote the governance of industrial involution-style competition through the construction of a unified national market, it is necessary to form a policy combination of factor marketization reform, competition policy adjustment, and industrial policy guidance, so as to break down the double distortion of administrative barriers and market failure, and then guide the industrial competition mode to shift towards outward expansion innovation.
