Tieying Yu

• Boston College

This paper studies the influence of executive verbal communication on the convergence of investors’ opinions, defined as reduction of differences in investors’ valuations. Building on the corporate communication and sensegiving literatures, we argue that executive verbal communication impacts investor opinion convergence through its influence not o...

Research in competitive dynamics has primarily analyzed how characteristics of observable attacks influence firms’ competitive responses. Why and how firms take action in response to critical events that affect their rivals, without being attacked themselves, is less well understood. Focusing on negative earnings surprises, we argue that a focal fi...

Firms have a lot to lose from the entry of competitors into their markets. Grounded in the research on interfirm rivalry and strategic communication, we proposed and tested hypotheses suggesting that when the managers of incumbent firms perceive a high threat of entry, they are more likely to use vagueness in their corporate communications to make...

We review the literature on public language used as a strategic tool to engage stakeholders and competitors. We define public language as words and text issued by an organization with specific strategic intent. Our review classifies studies into four typical settings for the strategic use of public language: entrepreneurial, image threatening, fina...

We explore the role of word responses in the competitive engagements of rival firms. Different from action responses, word responses are language issued by a firm in public forums and in response to a rival's attack. We challenge an implicit assumption in extant competitive dynamics research that firms do nothing if they do not respond to attacks w...

Although two decades have passed since the publication of Walsh and Ungson's (1991) seminal article on organizational memory, there has been only limited theoretical elaboration and application of this critical aspect of cognition in the strategic management literature. We remedy this gap by advancing the construct of competitive memory, which we d...

Drawing insights from competitive dynamics research, the upper-echelons perspective and social identity theory, we examine the impact of female influence in top management teams on firm competitive aggressiveness and the moderating effects of governance factors (boards and institutional investors) on the relationship. Our analyses of 36 pharmaceuti...

Although the importance of organizational communication in impression and legitimacy management has long been highlighted, little is known about how firm communication influence other critical aspects of management, such as CEO succession, competitive interactions, post-acquisition integration, and crisis management. In this symposium, we include f...

Risk management practices in factor markets, such as natural and financial hedging, may create heterogeneity among competitors in terms of their historical acquisition costs of inputs and resources. Although textbook economic theory suggests that firms should deploy resources based on opportunity costs, not historical acquisition costs, such hetero...

Competition ebbs and flows in cycles. Prior research has recognized the importance of studying the temporal facet of rivalry. A number of studies have examined the antecedents of competitive disruptions. No attention however has been paid to the duration of such disruptions, which has an important effect on the speed by which competitors settle int...

Our study develops theory about the role of language in the competitive engagement of rival firms. We start with the widely- researched action-response model of Smith, Grimm and Gannon (1992), describing how its roots in information-processing theory suggest that language should play an important role. We separate verbal actions and responses from...

Prior research on market entry paid little attention to identifying cost-effective ways that incumbent firms can use to discourage entry before it takes place. In this paper, we propose competitive signalling can be a viable, cost-effective, and under-examined mechanism, through which incumbents manage threats from potential entrants. Moreover, we...

An emerging literature highlights the relationship between competitive intensity and the likelihood that two rival firms will form an alliance. Placing this argument in an international context, we first suggest that the global competitive intensity between two rival multinationals positively affects the likelihood that they will ally in any host c...

Our study summarizes the state of knowledge on the topic of multimarket competition. We classify the current research into four broad themes: (1) the antecedents of multimarket contact (MMC), (2) the outcomes of MMC, (3) the contingencies that moderate the mutual forbearance hypothesis, and (4) extensions beyond traditional multimarket competition...

The mutual forbearance hypothesis states that when the same competitors meet in multiple markets, rivalry is deterred. Our study highlights how pressures for local responsiveness impact the veracity of this hypothesis for multinational corporations (MNCs) in host countries. We develop theory to explain how subsidiary ownership, home-host cultural d...

We describe how negative impacts emanating from an organizational crisis that initially strikes only one organization can overflow the boundaries of that organization and affect others in the industry. We argue that this spillover process is contingent on the characteristics of the organizational form to which the stricken organization belongs, the...

A change in an organization's reputation has consequences and implications that may go beyond that organization's boundaries. Drawing on social network and stakeholder research, we introduce the construct of reputation spillover to examine the process in which a reputational crisis occurred to one organization may spillover to other organizations t...

Our study investigates rivalry between multinational enterprises (MNEs) in host country markets. Drawing on the awareness-motivation-capability perspective, we show how the speed of an MNE's response to a rival's attack is influenced by resourcerelated factors, including distance, government constraints, and subsidiary control, and by market-relate...

How can strategic trade policy (STP) influence the competitive actions of firms when they expand abroad? Drawing from the multimarket competition and strategic trade policy literatures, we argue that STP will have strong effects on both home firm and foreign firm competitive activity. We distinguish among three policies: traditional strategic trade...

Drawing insights from strategic management and international business literature, the present study develops an integrated model to explain the competitive actions between multinational firms in a global context. Accordingly, two research questions are addressed: What key factors explain the competitive actions of multinational firms? What key fact...