Although issues of timing in interfirm rivalry are critical to strategic managers, rarely have they received scholarly attention. A model of competitive response timing is here proposed that contains three basic elements: competitive actions, responses, and response timing. The article discusses howfirms enhance performance by undertaking actions and responses; the speed with which one firm responds to another s action is explained by communication-information theory. Specifically, the speed with which afirm responds to a competitor's action is posited to be afunction of (a) characteristics of the actot; (b) characteristics of the action, (c) how the action is communicated, (d) the competitive environment, and (e) the characteristics of the potential respondingfirm. Hypotheses regarding the determinants of competitive response timing are developedfrom communication-information theory.
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