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The conclusions on the importance of corporate response timing to a crisis have remained inconsistent. Some studies suggest that active response may reduce negative impacts, whereas managers argue that issuing official response frustrates stakeholders and thus decreases the firm value. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of external media in the response timing strategy and the consequent stock market reaction.

Based on 130 corporate crises that befell publicly listed firms in China from 2007 to 2014, this paper uses the Baidu News Search Engine and Chinese Lexical Analysis System to construct the variables of the media characteristics. A structural equation model is established to test the hypotheses.

The results of this paper suggest that media coverage drives response timing after a crisis. Although an official response is a burden for firms, the timing strategy has multidimensional benefits including effectively alleviating negative effects (defined as buffering effects) and repairing the market (defined as restoring effects). Moreover, the buffering effects of response timing are stronger when completeness of response is low.

This study mainly contributes to crisis communication literature by introducing the role of media in prompting managers to make timing decisions. The findings of this study provide empirical support for the importance of timing response strategy.

Notes that much is known in the academic literature about factors that may be influential in firms’ market entry timing decisions. Specifically, in response to a competitors’ pioneering new product introduction, academic research finds many conditions that suggest a greater desirability of immediate market entry while many other conditions suggest a greater desirability of a delayed response. Reports the results of a survey and experiment where working managers and experienced MBA students were asked to evaluate the timing of market entry given a complex business scenario. The results show areas where there is a consensus among decision makers with the academic literature, as well as areas where views differ from that of the literature. Perverts and discusses insights gained into the decision making processes of managers for market entry timing decisions. The study can help managers in follower firms achieve greater success in formulating market entry timing strategies by reducing ambiguity in the timing implications of many internal and external conditions, as well as by drawing attention to potential action biases.

This paper aims to present a new framework that describes the relationship among market entry order and timing, the advantages accruing to first-movers and late-movers, entry timing premium (ETP), marketing strategy and enduring market performance of the firms. The framework, empirically tested using data from 241 business executives, expands extant research into new territory beyond first- and late-mover advantages in an attempt to reconcile a few streams of research in the area and provides an entry related, strategic assessment tool (ETP) for the managers. Contribution to marketing strategy theory and managerial implications are also presented.

Participants included informants in a firm’s strategic business unit who were the most familiar with a new product’s commercial launch, market condition at launch, competitor offerings, marketing activities and capabilities and eventual integration into or withdrawal from the product’s portfolio. Therefore, for the survey, the study targeted chief executive officers, vice presidents of marketing or sales, product or sales managers, general managers and regional managers. Both preference bias (Narus, 1984) and survivor biases among the respondents were addressed.

The research result of this study reveals two very significant aspects of marketing and marketing strategies. First, the importance of financial, pricing and cost strategies further attests to the fiercely competitive nature of the global market today and the tendency for firms to commoditize most products and services. An effective financial and pricing strategy, coupled with a higher level of ETP, is capable of leading a firm to initial market success in the product-market in which it competes. Both ETP (a positional advantage and resource of the firm) and financial and pricing strategies (a deliberate strategic decision of the management) are important to achieve this goal.

This study is limited in several ways. The effects of entry order and timing on market performance could be dependent on the types of industries and types of product categories involved. However, as the hypotheses were well supported, the “industry specific” factors would provide “fine-tuning” in the future study. Second, the nature of the product (goods or services) may also present varying effects on the relationship studied (for differences between manufacturing and service firms in pioneering advantages, see Song et al., 1999). Services’ intangible nature, difficulty in protecting property rights, high involvement of boundary-spanning employees and customers, high reliance on delivery and quality, and ease of imitation may alter the proposed relationships in the model and the moderating effects. Third, although this study used a “retrospective” protocol approach in the data collection by encouraging respondents to recall market, product and business information, this study is not longitudinal. Lack of longitudinal data in any study involving strategic planning, strategy execution and the long-term effects is no doubt a weakness. In addition, due to peculiarity and complexity with regard to regulation and other aspects in pharmaceutical and other industries, the theory might be limited to a certain extent.

In all, the integrated framework contributes to the understanding of the intricate issues surrounding first-mover advantage, late-mover advantage, entry order and timing and the role of marketing strategy. The framework provides practitioners guidance as to when to enter a product-market to gain advantageous positions and how to maintain that advantage. Firms that use a deliberate late-mover strategy could also benefit from the research finding in mapping out their strategic courses of action.

This study believes that the halo effect surrounding first-mover advantage may have obscured the visions of some researchers and managers, and the pursuit of a silver bullet has led to frenzied interests in becoming a “first-mover” or a deliberate “late-mover”. The theoretical framework, which is substantiated by empirical testing, invalidates the long-held claim that entry of a particular kind (first-movers or late-movers) yields any unique competitive advantage. It is a firms’ careful selection of marketing strategies and careful execution of the strategies through effective operational tactics that would lead to enduring competitive advantage, under an adequate level of ETP.

Given the importance of style allocation strategy under the outsourced chief investment officer (OCIO) structure, the authors examine the validity of style allocation strategies in the Korean stock market. The authors find that external investment agencies can improve performance by using newly suggested investment styles such as high dividend yield and low volatility as well as traditional styles. In addition, the authors find that the style combination strategies create economically large and statistically significant returns. Finally, empirical results indicate that factor timing strategies suggested in this study can improve the reward-to-risk ratio. In sum, the empirical findings indicate that external investment agencies under the OCIO structure can improve performance using active style allocation strategies.

Increasing rates of change in technologies, markets, and other environmental factors make time a valued resource in marketing decisions. When decisions are made and implemented requires explicit managerial attention. Increased pressures on managers to develop profitable streams of new products make new product entry one of the more important marketing decisions affected by timing—especially in a rapidly changing environment. To improve the management of this decision, time‐based competitive entry strategies are considered, along with an approach for making the timing decision. The approach is based on a case study. Implementation aspects of the market entry timing decision are also considered.

Current US tax laws provide investors an incentive to time the sales of their bonds to minimize tax liability. This gives rise to a tax-timing option that affects bond value. In reality, corporate bond investors’ tax-timing strategy is complicated by risk of default. Existing term structure models have ignored the effect of the tax-timing option, and how much corporate bond value is due to the tax-timing option is unknown. In this chapter, we assess the effects of taxes and stochastic interest rates on the timing option value and equilibrium price of corporate bonds by considering discount and premium amortization, multiple trading dates, transaction costs, and changes in the level and volatility of interest rates. We find that the value of the tax-timing option accounts for a substantial proportion of corporate bond price even when interest rate volatility is low. Ignoring the timing option value results in overestimation of credit spread, and underestimation of default probability and the marginal investor’s income tax rate. These estimation biases generally increase with bond maturity and credit risk.

This study aims to examine the behavior of cash raised through market timing efforts and the success of such efforts in creating value to shareholders.

It is shown that in two quarters, subsequent to raising equity, cash balance of market timers is higher but after that, there is no significant difference between timers and non-timers. Results of speed of adjustment regressions indicate that market timers move faster toward their target cash levels.

Market timers are small firms that suffer from asymmetric information. They have limited access to capital market, and raising external capital is an opportunity that should be timed. The results suggest that, on average, these firms are managed by more able executives, who are 10 per cent more likely to time the market; however, it is found that timing efforts are unsuccessful in creating value to shareholders even after controlling for the mitigating effect of managerial ability. Subsequent to market timing, on average, market timers earn significantly lower abnormal return over different holding periods relative to their comparable non-timer counterparts.

Overall, the results undermine the validity of market timing as a value-maximizing financial policy.

This study aims to examine the consequences of tax authorities’ use of concession-timing negotiation strategies on tax practitioners and their final proposed offers.

This is an experimental study conducted on tax practitioners using a design of 2 × 1, varying the tax authorities’ negotiation strategy (i.e. concession-gradual and concession-end strategies) across two levels.

The concessionary negotiation strategies adopted by tax authorities influence tax practitioners’ final proposed offers, their perceptions of fairness (i.e. distributive justice and procedural justice) and their aggressiveness of stance in tax audit negotiations.

This experimental study contributes to existing research on tax authority-tax practitioner negotiation models used during tax audits by providing the first evidence that concession timing matters. The study extends the negotiation model to include tax aggressiveness as a new variable and examines the indirect roles of fairness and offers in tax audit negotiations.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the interaction of pricing strategies with other aspects of launch, in particular, timing, logistics/inventory strategy, and coordination with support organizations, and the effect on profit and competitive performance.

The paper presents an empirical study of 215 recent new product launches, focusing on pricing and other strategic and tactical launch decisions and the resulting profitability and competitive performance. Clusters of new product launches are identified and the profitability and competitiveness of each cluster are discussed.

The paper finds that some clusters are related to greater success than others. The most profitable and competitively successful cluster contained launches supported by solid market research and marked by good timing decisions. By contrast, the least profitable/successful cluster were higher price launches unsupported by adequate research.

The study is limited by the fact that the sampling frame is made up of members of a professional association of product development and management, and may therefore be more representative of “best practice” in new product development (NPD) than of NPD in general. The authors believe the use of the key informant method is justified in this study, however this method has been criticized in the past.

The pricing decision for a new product is sometimes oversimplified as a “high‐low” or “skimming versus penetration” choice. The study finds that the actual effect of pricing on ultimate success is much more complex, and that one must consider not only price level, but also the timing of the launch, the logistics and inventory strategy, the extent of market research, testing, and planning, and so forth.

Management, over time, takes a series of specific strategic actions. As strategic actions we define actions aimed at influencing how the actor is related to other actors. We propose that when a strategic action is committed affects the outcome of the action. An important reason for this is that strategic actions over time can be regarded as interdependent sequences of actions. Timing and sequences may be more or less – or is not at all – preplanned by an actor. In a network perspective a focal actor is dependent on other actors that commit strategic actions. This creates interdependencies that vary over time, which a focal actor influences in a proactive, interactive and/or reactive way. The timing of strategic actions is a general, quite complex and elusive phenomenon to be handled in practice and theory. Despite its importance, very little research has been published.