Abstract
Incumbent firms frequently fail to identify relevant entrants as competitors. Established research largely falls short to explain this phenomenon. We theorize whether and when entrant’s actions within an incumbent’s market—in particular the pace and irregular rhythm of capacity expansion—emanate signals that eventually result in the entrant being identified as a competitor. We further argue that these effects are contingent to the entrant’s scope in the incumbent’s market, as well as faultlines within the incumbents’ top management team. Using the entry and growth of Middle Eastern airlines into the European airline market as our empirical setting, multi-source 10-year panel data—covering flight-schedules, airline annual reports, CEO press interviews, and biographical data—largely support our hypotheses. We offer contributions to the competitor identification literature, competitive dynamics research, and research on top management teams.
Published Version
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