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Longitudinal regression analysis is conducted to clarify causal relations and control for unwanted influences from actor heterogeneity and state dependence on theoretically important coefficient estimates. Because strategic management contains theory on how firms differ and how firm actions are influenced by their current strategic position and recent experiences, consistency of theory and methodology often requires use of longitudinal methods. We describe the theoretical motivation for longitudinal methods and outline some common methods. Based on a survey of recent articles in strategic management, we argue that longitudinal methods are now used more frequently than before, but the use is still inconsistent and insufficiently justified by theoretical or empirical considerations. In particular, strategic management researchers should use dynamic models more often, and should test for the presence of actor effects, autocorrelation, and heteroscedasticity before applying corrections.

Two duopoly market structures are experimentally constructed. Payoff tables describe basic conditions in an X market and a Y market. In one market structure two rivals choose X quantities and a different set of rivals choose Y quantities. These markets develop equilibria independently. A second market structure creates a multiproduct producer that chooses both an X and Y output. Separate X and Y duopolists are rivals to the multiproduct producer. The multiproduct/multimarket rival creates a horizontal connection for the X and Y markets. Subjects choose outputs from payoff tables for at least thirty five periods. Compared to the independent duopolies, the horizontal connection raises outputs in the X market and lowers outputs in the Y market. These impacts are statistically significant. We find Granger causality for output choices moving from X to Y and from Y to X in the connected markets; however learning that moves through the horizontal connection is less influential than learning within the market. Further testing shows that competitive learning travels better than cooperative learning through the multimarket firm.

Using data from securities analysts, who are awarded status by the third-party organization Institutional Investor magazine, we examine the emergence of competition and articulate a model of competitive response among actors aware of the importance of status and some of the dimensions on which it may be gained. We predict analysts’ initiating or ceasing coverage of stocks in response to other analysts initiating coverage on stocks they cover. We find that competition can emerge because of status seeking rather than as a response to own capabilities or market needs, with compelling, and potentially negative, market implications for overt status seeking.

The growing literature on multimarket contact and mutual forbearance in management and economics has produced an inflation of multimarket contact measures. The lack of validation of these multiple measures has hindered the accumulation of consistent knowledge and comparison of empirical findings. This paper investigates the measurement of the multimarket contact concept. Specifically, we review the existing measures of multimarket contact, identify the main differences among them, and evaluate their reliability and discriminant and predictive validity at multiple levels of analysis, both cross-sectionally and longitudinally. The results indicate substantial differences in the reliability and discriminant validity of these measures. Predictive validity depends critically on the level of measurement and on whether longitudinal or cross-sectional correlations are considered.

This paper discusses the design of hypothesis tests about multimarket contact and uses a sample of chemicals firms to illustrate researchers' choices and to provide new evidence about the effects of multimarket contact in product and innovation markets. Multimarket contact has a large, stable and statistically significant association with a firm's citations of the patents of another firm. The effect is present even when controls are added for each paired firm's pertinent characteristics (including the effects of its product and innovation markets) that would be expected to affect citations or reflect the effects of the research underlying the citations. New probability measures of multimarket contact are introduced and discussed, and their performance is compared with simple count measures.

In this paper we differentiate between the creation and subsequent exploitation of multimarket contact. We examine specific factors that influence the likelihood that a firm will seek to develop a purposive set of overlapping markets with specific competitors, as opposed to developing naë contacts based on an internally derived logic. We suggest that competitor identification, organization structure, ease of competitive response and industry structure (including the presence of network externalities, barriers to entry, and industry growth rate) all play important roles in determining the ability of managers to seek rivalry-reduction that has been found to follow the development of market overlap. We offer several propositions that serve to define the boundaries of research into mutual forbearance and multimarket competition, and that may help to explain empirical results obtained to date.

This paper addresses the topic of knowledge transfer between firms that meet in multiple markets. Theoretical arguments are developed regarding the issues thought to influence the process of knowledge transfer between multimarket firms, in general, and also regarding the emergence and influence of macrocultures on this process. We use a structural equivalence lens to develop this theory, suggesting that multimarket competitors are likely to share macrocultures to the degree that their markets overlap. The structural equivalence of multimarket competitors influences the direction that they are likely to look for knowledge resources.

Research linking firms' hypercompetitive strategic actions and performance focuses on firm level performance, and assumes that the impact of each firm's strategic actions affects only a limited number of other firms. We advance a complementary perspective for multiunit-multimarket firms in which the action performance linkage operates at the market-unit level (i.e. within a specific geographic product or service market), and strategic actions within a market-unit are assumed to affect all other firms participating in that market-unit. Supporting the perspective, our analysis of Canadian insurance firms shows that these firms' performance in a marketunit depends on the number and simplicity of their strategic actions in that market unit - both absolutely and vis-d-vis those of others competing in the market unit. Our study offers new insight into how multiunit-multimarket firms compete across a series of market-units - and how they can compete more effectively.