News Co-Coverage-Based Strategic Groups

Abstract

Strategic groups are often delineated by attribute similarities or cognitive maps. The former is criticised for producing methodological artefacts, while the latter has cognitive limitations. To address the deficiencies of existing approaches, we propose a news-co-coverage-based approach, which yields two advantages. First, the groups are identified by interorganisational relationships; hence they are not statistical artefacts. Second, the news is a third-party assessment; as such we minimise cognitive limitations. The proposed methodology is applied to a sample collected from the US high-tech sector between 2001 and 2017. Testing the robustness of the group solutions, in several key strategic dimensions, we document strong intra-group similarities and inter-group differences. We also find that firms in the same groups are more likely to be cited as competitors in news articles, suggesting the proposed approach is effective in capturing rivals.