Dueling or the battle royale? The impact of task complexity on the evaluation of entry threat

Abstract

Current marketing research on response to entry assumes that an incumbent decision maker faces potential rivals one at a time as in a series of duels. In many circumstances, however, an incumbent decision maker faces a large number of entrants simultaneously (a "battle royale"). An experiment using experienced managers shows that the increased complexity produced by multiple entrants had a significant effect on the managers' decision processes and their decision outcomes. Specifically, when faced with multiple entrants, the managers adopted more noncompensatory decision processes, and were more likely to misidentify the most threatening entrant as defined by their self-explicated weights or conjoint part-worths. These results provide insight into an unexplained gap between the extant normative and empirical research on response to entry.

An Information Processing Model of Marketing Performance Measurement

“…The more activities checked, the more complex we deemed the ultimate marketing measurement task, drawing on the "number of items" dimension of task complexity discussed previously. Klemz and Gruca (2001; operationalized task complexity similarly by manipulating the number of potential entrants managers had to evaluate in studies of marketing decision making. Consumer researchers have also used the number of objects to be evaluated as an operationalization of task complexity (e.g., Lussier and Olshavsky 1979;Payne 1976;Swait and Adamowicz 2001;Ursic and Helgeson 1990).…”

The Wisdom of Crowds: Impact of Collective Size and Expertise Transfer on Collective Performance

“…Accordingly, we posit that the collective performance should vary depending on task difficulty. Drawing on the previous literature, we conceptualize task difficulty as the task attributes that raise individuals' cognitive processing needed to reach a solution [5,23,37], reflecting both the subjective and objective difficulty individuals perceive in performing tasks [41].…”

A matter of Motivation - The Effects of Risk Preference and Task Complexity on the Auditor’s Motivation

“…required number of criteria) and alternatives (e.g. number of alternatives, discriminability) (Fisher et al 2003;Klemz and Gruca 2003;Gill and Hicks 2006) or the amount of information (Bonner 1994).…”