Who Thinks about the Competition? Managerial Ability and Strategic Entry in US Local Telephone Markets
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines how manager and firm characteristics relate to entry decisions in US local telephone markets. To do so, it develops a structural econometric model that allows managers to be heterogeneous in their ability to correctly conjecture competitor behavior. The model adapts Camerer, Ho, and Chong's (2004) Cognitive Hierarchy model to a real-world setting. We observe the industry in 1998, shortly after the Telecommunications Act of 1996 opened up the market. We find that older firms with older, more experienced managers have higher estimated levels of strategic ability. Managers with degrees in economics or business, and managers with graduate degrees, also have higher estimated levels of strategic ability. We find no evidence that university quality is related to ability. We repeat this exercise using data from 2000, 2002, and 2004. While the core results do not change, the overall level of measured strategic ability increases substantially by 2004. The estimates of strategic ability are also correlated with survival: those firms with lower estimated levels of ability are more likely to exit the industry early.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".