Innovation Forum 2016.2.8 Hitoshi Mitsuhashi
Topic:
“Missing Contenders: Competitive Asymmetry and Organizational Inattentiveness to Potential Competitive Threats”
Although previous research has suggested the possibility of firms not mutually recognizing each other as rivals (i.e., competitive
asymmetry) and cautioned managers that failing to recognize or missing identifying potential rivals can have detrimental consequences on organizational survival, little empirical effort has been made to explore why firms fail to consider other firms that view them as rivals (i.e., contenders). In this study, we posit that competitive asymmetry could be an unintentional or intentional consequence of two sequential and interdependent processes: noticing and classification. Using the 10-K data as to how firms view their own competitive environments, we find that firms are more likely to miss contenders that are founded at different times, with whom they share fewer third-party firms as references points in competitive environments, and whose own and rivals’ category memberships are ambiguous. Our results advance cognitive-based theories on competitions that provide
implications for competitive asymmetry and organizational inattentiveness to potential competitive threats.
Speaker:
Hitoshi Mitsuhashi
(Professor, Organization and Management Theory in Faculty of Business and Commerce, Keio University)
Date:
February 8th (Monday) 2016
from 16:30 ～ 18:00
Place:
Conference room of the second floor of the IIR building
Organizer:
Masaru Karube