Research On The Influence Of Multimarket Contact On Competition In R&D Market

In order to understand the antecedents and consequences of firms’ competitive behaviors,mutual forbearance hypothesis in multimarket competition have received increasing attention.Although the current literature provides large number of theoretical and empirical contributions to the impact of multimarket contact on firms’ competitive intensity in product markets,scholars’ understanding of how multimarket contact affects firms’ competitive behavior in the R&D market,which is the upstream of the value chain is still limited.Based on the literature on multimarket contact and factor market competition,this paper investigates the influence of multimarket contact on R&D intensity,innovation performance and alliance partner selection from the perspectives of firm-market level,firm-group level and firm-dyad level.The three levels are progressive and microscopic in order.Theoretically,this paper examines the impact of multimarket contact on firms’ competitiveness in the R&D market from the perspectives of competition dynamic,strategic group and organizational learning,and identifies possible boundary conditions.The background of this paper is the global pharmaceutical industry and the data collected from 2007 to 2019.The empirical results show that multimarket contact has a positive impact on firms’ R&D investment intensity,patent stock and sale decline rate,and resource liquidity have moderating effect on the positive impact of multimarket contact on R&D investment.Multimarket contact promotes the improvement of innovation firms’ performance,and the mobility barriers height of strategic groups which a firm belongs to moderates this positive relationship.Multimarket contact weakens the possibility of exploration alliance formation between two firms,while strengthen the possibility of exploitation alliance,and technology similarity moderate these two relationships.These empirical results show that the influence of multimarket contact on the firms’ competitive intensity in the R&D market is different from that in the product market.In the R&D market multimarket contact shows a competitive effect rather than mutual forbearance effect which is suggested in previous literature.This dissertation has made contributions to the research of dynamic competition,multimarket contact,factor market competition,strategic groups,strategic alliances and so on.