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-related factors, including initiating country importance, location of the response in the initiating country, and multimarket contact. We provide a new conceptualization and empirical approach for studying rivalry between MNEs. Additionally, our theory and evidence imply that important constraints on MNE actions in host country markets go well beyond the constraints faced in domestic competition.

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 characteristics of other organizations in the same industry, and the characteristics of the industry itself. Finally, we speculate that the spillover process, coupled with differential mortality, might move crisis-prone industries toward more robust structures over time.

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 research. We also highlight several areas and research questions that we believe will be particularly promising for future research.

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