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Incumbent Firms (incumbent + firm)
Selected AbstractsIntrinsic quality improvements and network externalitiesINTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC THEORY, Issue 4 2007Jean J. Gabszewicz L11; L12; L15 We analyze the optimal pricing choice of an incumbent firm that sells a good with network externalities and is threatened by the entry of a higher intrinsic quality variant. In the framework of a vertical differentiation model, we find a necessary and sufficient condition under which intrinsic quality improvement occurs as a result of this competition. [source] Buyers' Miscoordination, Entry and Downstream Competition,THE ECONOMIC JOURNAL, Issue 531 2008Chiara Fumagalli This article shows that buyers' coordination failures might prevent entry in an industry with an incumbent firm and a more efficient potential entrant. If there were a single buyer, or if all buyers formed a central purchasing agency, coordination failures would be avoided and efficient entry would always occur. More generally, exclusion is less likely the lower the number of buyers. For any given number of buyers, exclusion is less likely the more fiercely buyers compete in the downstream market. First, intense competition may prevent miscoordination equilibria from arising; second, in cases where miscoordination equilibria still exist, it lowers the maximum price that the incumbent can sustain at such exclusionary equilibria. [source] Launch decisions and competitive reactions: an exploratory market signaling studyTHE JOURNAL OF PRODUCT INNOVATION MANAGEMENT, Issue 3 2002Erik Jan Hultink When firms launch a new product into the marketplace they often aim to find a balance between building scale and provoking extensive and quick competitive reactions. Competitors react to new products when they perceive the product introduction as hostile, committed or when they feel that the product entry will have a large impact on their profitability. The present study develops a framework that shows how strong and fast incumbents react to perceived market signals resulting from a new product's launch decisions (broad targeting, penetration pricing, advertising intensity and product advantage). The strength of the relationships between the launch decisions and the perceived market signals was expected to depend on one industry characteristic (i.e., market growth) and on one entrant characteristic (i.e., aggressive reputation). We distinguished three market signals in our framework: hostility, commitment and consequences. Signal hostility refers to the extent to which the approach used by an acting firm to introduce the new product is perceived hostile whereas the commitment signal refers to the extent to which incumbents perceive the entrant firm to be committed to the new product introduction. The consequence signal is defined as the incumbents' perception of the impact of a new product entry on their profitability. We tested our framework using cross-sectional data provided by 73 managers in The Netherlands who recently reacted to a new product entry. The results clearly reveal which launch decisions create which market signals. For example, incumbents consider high advantage new products hostile and consequential. Penetration pricing and an intense advertising campaign are also considered hostile, especially in fast growing markets. Broad targeting is not perceived hostile, especially not when used by entrants with an aggressive reputation. In addition, this study explored the impact of three perceived market signals on the strength and speed of competitive reaction. The results reveal that perceived signals of hostility and commitment positively impact the strength of reaction, whereas the perceived consequence signal positively impacts the speed of reaction. The article concludes with the implications of our study for managers and academics. The relevance to managers was assessed from both the perspective of the incumbent firm that must defend, and that of the rival firm that is introducing the new product. [source] Lifetime Employment Contract and Strategic Entry Deterrence: Cournot and BertrandAUSTRALIAN ECONOMIC PAPERS, Issue 1 2001Kazuhiro Ohnishi This paper is based on a two-stage model of an incumbent firm and a potential entrant, and studies both quantity-setting competition and price-setting competition. We consider a lifetime-employment-contract policy as a strategic commitment that generates kinks in the reaction curve. Furthermore, demand functions are classified into two cases in terms of the strategic relevance between both firms. Therefore, we examine the following four cases: ,quantity-setting competition with strategic substitutes', ,quantity-setting competition with strategic complements', ,price-setting competition with strategic substitutes' and ,price-setting competition with strategic complements'. The purpose of this paper is to analyse entry deterrence in the four cases and to show the effectiveness of the lifetime-employment-contract policy as a result of its analyses. [source] Splitting the Baby: An Empirical Test of Rules of Thumb in Regulatory Price SettingKYKLOS INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF SOCIAL SCIENCES, Issue 3 2005T. Randolph Beard Summary This article provides an empirical evaluation of a recent and important exercise in regulatory price setting in the United States. The 1996 Telecommunications Act required incumbent local phone companies to sell components of their network to rival firms at regulated prices, and the prices for these ,unbundled network elements' were based primarily on independent estimates of forward-looking economic costs. Our econometric analysis reveals that, while cost is a primary determinant of element prices, the prices also reflect foregone retail profits for incumbent firms. Statistical tests suggest that ,splitting the baby' is an accurate positivist description of public agency behavior. [source] Innovation, Technological Conditions and New Firm Survival,THE ECONOMIC RECORD, Issue 267 2008PAUL H. JENSEN High neonatal mortality is one of the most salient ,facts' about firm performance in the industrial organisation literature. We model firm survival and examine the relative influence of firm, industry and macroeconomic factors on survival for new vis-à-vis incumbent firms in Australia. In particular, we focus on how the intensity of innovation in each industry relates to firm survival. Our results imply that while new firms thrive in risky and innovative industries, they are also more susceptible to business cycle effects such as changes in the rate of growth of industry profits and the availability of equity finance. [source] Dynamic or Static Capabilities?THE JOURNAL OF PRODUCT INNOVATION MANAGEMENT, Issue 5 2009Process Management Practices, Response to Technological Change Whether and how organizations adapt to changes in their environments has been a prominent theme in organization and strategy research. Within this research, there is controversy about whether organizational routines hamper or facilitate adaptation. Organizational routines give rise to inertia but are also the vehicles for change in recent work on dynamic capabilities. This rising interest in routines in research coincides with an increase in management practices focused on organizational routines and processes. This study explores how the increasing use of process management practices affected organizational response to a major technological change through new product developments. The empirical setting is the photography industry over a decade, during the shift from silver-halide chemistry to digital technology. The advent and rise of practices associated with the new ISO 9000 certification program in the 1990s coincided with increasing technological substitution in photography, allowing for assessing how increasing attention to routines through ISO 9000 practices over time affected ongoing responsiveness to the technological change. The study further compares the effects for the incumbent firms in the existing technology with nonincumbent firms entering from elsewhere. Relying on longitudinal panel data models as well as hazard models, findings show that greater process management practices dampened response to new generations of digital technology, but this effect differed for incumbents and nonincumbents. Increasing use of process management practices over time had a greater negative effect on incumbents' response to the rapid technological change. The study contributes to research in technological change by highlighting specific management practices that may create disconnects between firms' capabilities and changing environments and disadvantage incumbents in the face of radical technological change. This research also contributes to literature on organizational routines and capabilities. Studying the effects of increasing ISO 9000 practices undertaken in firms provides an opportunity to gauge the effects of systematic routinization of organizational activities and their effects on adaptation. This research also contributes to management practice. The promise of process management is to help firms adapt to changing environments, and, as such, managers facing technological change may adopt process management practices as a response to uncertainty and change. But managers must more fully understand the potential benefits and risks of process management to ensure these practices are used in the appropriate contexts. [source] Intellectual Property, Architecture, and the Management of Technological Transitions: Evidence from Microsoft CorporationTHE JOURNAL OF PRODUCT INNOVATION MANAGEMENT, Issue 3 2009Alan MacCormack Many studies highlight the challenges facing incumbent firms in responding effectively to major technological transitions. Though some authors argue that these challenges can be overcome by firms possessing what have been called dynamic capabilities, little work has described in detail the critical resources that these capabilities leverage or the processes through which these resources accumulate and evolve. This paper explores these issues through an in-depth exploratory case study of one firm that has demonstrated consistently strong performance in an industry that is highly dynamic and uncertain. The focus for the present study is Microsoft, the leading firm in the software industry. The focus on Microsoft is motivated by providing evidence that the firm's product performance has been consistently strong over a period of time in which there have been several major technological transitions,one indicator that a firm possesses dynamic capabilities. This argument is supported by showing that Microsoft's performance when developing new products in response to one of these transitions,the growth of the World Wide Web,was superior to a sample of both incumbents and new entrants. Qualitative data are presented on the roots of Microsoft's dynamic capabilities, focusing on the way that the firm develops, stores, and evolves its intellectual property. Specifically, Microsoft codifies knowledge in the form of software "components," which can be leveraged across multiple product lines over time and accessed by firms developing complementary products. The present paper argues that the process of componentization, the component "libraries" that result, the architectural frameworks that define how these components interact, and the processes through which these components are evolved to address environmental changes represent critical resources that enable the firm to respond to major technological transitions. These arguments are illustrated by describing Microsoft's response to two major technological transitions. [source] BERTRAND COMPETITION CAN YIELD HIGHER PRICES THAN MONOPOLYBULLETIN OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH, Issue 3 2007Helge Sanner D42; L11; R32 ABSTRACT If we take into account the spatial dimension of markets, prices of incumbent firms may be higher and consumer surplus may be lower with competition than with monopoly. This result obtains unambiguously, even in the supposedly highly competitive case of Bertrand competition. Moreover, we are able to show that consumers of the commodity may be worse off with duopoly, if the distance between the firms' sites is sufficiently large. [source] | ||||||||||