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The purpose of this paper is to examine whether competitor concentration relates to better customer acceptance of the firm’s offerings and better networking of the firm with competitors and government officials.

The research is conducted in the context of the transition economy of Vietnam, using a combination of methods. Qualitative interviews are followed by a survey of 199 small firms in Hanoi, Vietnam. Since competitor concentration is count data, Poisson regression is used to test the relationship between networking, customer acceptance, and competitor concentration.

The results show that locating in a competitor concentration area improves customer acceptance of the firm’s offerings and increases networking with competitors, while decreasing networking with government officials. Competitor concentration does not help improve firm performance.

A sample of 199 businesses in the food, furniture, and jewelry sectors in Hanoi may not be representative of all private businesses in Vietnam. The use of cross-sectional data could not establish causational relationships among variables.

Small firms in transition economies should be aware of the trade-offs between initial customer acceptance and negative consequences of being in a competitor concentrated area. Thus, once the firm’s offerings are generally accepted by customers, the firm may consider moving out of competitor concentration areas to expand and differentiate.

This paper points out that in the absence of effective market institutions, businesses want to be located near a concentration of similar firms as a means of gaining initial customer acceptance. This initial acceptance does not necessarily help firms improve business performance beyond the firm’s survival.

The purpose of this study is twofold: (1) to examine the incremental contribution of product market fluidity (P_THREAT), another measure of competition from that of the Herfindahl index (H_COMP) and (2) to examine how a research and development (R&D) real activities earnings management strategy to meet an earnings target is influenced by competition.

Using a linear probability model, we test whether P_THREAT is incremental to the H_COMP competition measure and whether it influences the likelihood of firms using abnormally low R&D real activities earnings management to meet an earnings target.

We find that P_THREAT is incrementally informative to the commonly used Herfindahl measure of competition in predicting abnormally low R&D real activities earnings management activities. This finding is consistent with the notion of examining P_THREAT because the Herfindahl index alone may be incomplete, depending on the product makeup of a company. The negative coefficient suggests that reducing discretionary spending on R&D in the short run could have a detrimental effect on long-term profits because bypassed R&D opportunities would put firms at a disadvantage with their competitors' R&D efforts. In contrast, we find that firms are more likely to use R&D activities earnings management as a mechanism to meet an earnings target when P_THREAT is high. This suggests that when high competitive pressure exists, firms are more likely to use abnormally low R&D as a mechanism to meet an earnings target.

We specifically focus on R&D activities earnings management because our primary competition measure, P_THREAT, captures changes in rival firms' products relative to the firm. Because R&D is primarily what drives product change, R&D is the type of real activities earnings management that is most relevant to our competition measure. Hence, this study contributes to the literature by examining how competition influences the likelihood of firms possibly engaging in R&D activities earnings management and meeting earnings targets in the presence of P_THREAT competition.

A growing body of literature has emphasized the importance of innovative strategy as a source of competitive advantage. Drazin and Shoonhoven summarized the literature using multilevel theoretical perspectives (community, population, and organization) that affect organizational innovative behavior. In parallel, Fiegenbaum et al. developed an organizational level theory, based on prospect theory, to explain how risky strategies are determined within organizations. They argued that organizational reference points delineate organizational attitudes toward risk‐taking into two polarized regimes: risk‐aversive whereas below it is risk‐assertive. They described the organizational mechanism that converts attitudes toward risk‐taking into actual risk‐aversive and risk‐assertive strategic behavior. A three‐dimensional space is provided that illustrates the spectrum of strategic reference points (SRP). The current study extends SRP theory. It is proposed that the nature of the industry, organizational strategy, and performance impact the kind of reference points used, which, in turn, impact risk‐taking behavior towards innovative strategy.

In this, the second edition, the experience of actually running a marketing planning process in organisations further updates and revises the highly practical emphasis. The need for vision, how to enunciate it, and the interface between various levels of managers are integrated specifically into the process. Further analysis using the SWOT technique is provided together with enhanced insight into maintaining competitive advantage. Essentially a practical manual on running a planning process, the worksheet method has been well tried and tested. The experience of managers who have implemented the process using the first edition is included to enhance the technique′s dynamism and effectiveness.

Originally written as a workshop manual with the intention of closing the gap between current accepted marketing planning concepts and actual management practice, this special issue is a clear, methodical guide to the planning process covering corporate goals, market analysis, competitive comparison, internal allocation, SWOT analysis, strategies and tactics, marketing plan evaluation, and controls and measurements. Included are 32 worksheets to encourage systematic organisation of relevant information. The text's method relies on the shared experiences of managers, and has been successfully used in diverse areas, from computers and banking to industrial packaging.

This paper undertakes a brief marketing analysis of the major library automation products and suppliers in the UK, focusing on aspects such as market growth, market share, market concentration, and competitor positions in terms of segmentation analysis. General conclusions relating to the marketplace are provided together with implications for current and potential customers.

The purpose of the present study is to discuss the combined effect of predation risk and firms' market power on cash holdings.

The authors tested hypotheses by using consolidated financial data in Japanese firms.

The authors find that firms' cash holdings increase with a rise in predation risk faced by firms. However, the higher the firm's market power, the weaker the above interplay becomes. Moreover, the authors find that even when firms' investments are decreased at the industry level, firms with larger cash holdings seek to mitigate predation risk by funding strategic investments with the potential to steal rivals' market share.

The authors recognize the importance of a firm's market power. Take a firm's market power into consideration to analyze the mechanism of a firm's cash holdings, there is a possibility that the mechanism of a firm's cash holdings as presented by the previous studies will be changed.

“Competition intensity” is a factor in addressing competitiveness. The understanding on competition intensity is prerequisite to the formulation of industrial competition policies as well as firms’ competition strategies. In the construction context, whereas competition intensity can be measured using a number of traditional approaches (e.g. competitor number, concentration), the measurement is often criticized for poor efficiency. The purpose of this paper is to propose a new model for measuring competition intensity in light of the theory of discriminant analysis.

The proposed model is composed of predictor variables concerned with market operation as well as criterion variables that classify markets into a few predefined groups based on the values of competition intensity. Empirical data of China's local construction markets were collected to verify the proposed model.

The research findings indicate that the model can offset the drawbacks of traditional measures in the construction market.

It is recommended using the proposed model to predict the competition trend of construction market especially when data for the traditional approaches are poor or not readily available.

The proposed model is a development of the literature in examining competition intensity.

The purpose of this paper is to further the knowledge of how industries perform, and sheds light on how the relative positions of industry change over time.

Using rank-order listings, histograms, and linear regressions, the comparisons of firms in the Fortune 1000 yield four results, two that are confirmatory, and two that are new.

As expected, industries differ widely in performance, regardless of the financial metric used, and there is a dramatic difference between within-industry variance (high) and between-industry variance (low). In fact, high-performing firms in less profitable industries often outperform low-performing firms in more profitable industries. Contrary to previous research, the paper shows that industries shift relative position over time: the industries with the highest return on equity in one year often are not the highest in subsequent years; and, contrary to IO theory, the paper finds that concentration is not a reliable predictor of profitability. Although certain industries may show increased profitability after undergoing concentration, there is no consistent relationship between an industry's concentration ratio and that industry's average profitability.

While the research is limited to its use of visual (such as histogram) and qualitative (such as rank-order) observations of only large (Fortune 1000) US-based, public firms, the results suggest that researchers should decompose the elements of industry structure and firm strategies to understand what, specifically, contributes to variation in firm performance.

For executives, the research confirms that the quality of their business strategies is more important than the initial choice of industries within which they choose to compete. Simply competing in an industry with high average profitability does not guarantee success.

This research shows how industries vary significantly in relative profit rankings over time, a finding that differs from prior research where time coefficients are found to be small. In addition, the research challenges the traditional IO notion that industry concentration leads to superior performance.