| Given a set of competing products, which are more likely to succeed? As decisive as it is for marketing scholars as well as managers, the answer to this question is also more than recondite thanks to the complex dynamics of rivalry among products. This complexity hinges primarily on the "interactive" nature of the competition, which renders the ultimate outcome of any strategic action contingent upon the way the competitors respond to that action. To elucidate the impact of interactive and coevolutionary dynamics in the competitiveness of products, this dissertation advances a stance based on a theory from evolutionary biology named the Red Queen Competition.;Red Queen Competition rests on the idea that competition among the entities in an ecosystem de-selects less fit entities. Entities that survive competition, then, are more fit, and so, in turn, they generate stronger competition. This escalating competitive intensity amplifies both the rate at which less fit entities are de-selected and the pressure for survivors to improve their fit to the ever-changing dynamics of competition, which recursively aggravates the strength of competition, and so on. Based on this stance, this dissertation is comprised of three essays each of which analyzes the survival effects of (1) the product innovations, (2) the impact of post-launch modifications of the products in the market on their competitiveness, and (3) how these innovations at different levels of a nested hierarchical system of products and companies interact, respectively. |
