How Does Competition Affect High-Tech Firms’ Time-to-Market Decision? Sang-Hoon Kim* Seoul National University Seoul, Korea

In fast-paced industries such as high-tech industry, time-to-market is one of the key strategic decisions to be made. With competition, firms not only need to consider market readiness but also should try to optimize new product launch timing by balancing the tradeoff between advantages and disadvantages of becoming a pioneer. Would a firm compete head-to-head by accelerating the project, or wait and then follow-up quickly after uncertainties clear up? The current paper illustrates how we can examine this issue by introducing an empirical modeling approach based on duration analysis. Specifically, a hazard function approach is taken to analyze time-based competition, and the proposed model demonstrates for the first time in the marketing literature the possibility to capture the relational structure between two competing hazard rates. Though the empirical question could not be answered due to data availability, a Monte-Carlo simulation study assures the usefulness of the model