"Competitive Forbearance: The Content, the Process, and the Outcomes of Purposefully Not Acting"
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Strategy research has predominantly focused on how firms act and has mainly ignored competitive forbearance: decisions to not act despite a possibility or even a temptation to do so. Competitive forbearance occurs when managers are aware of an opportunity to act, capable of acting, but purposefully choose not to act. In this paper, we develop a theoretical framework for studying competitive forbearance. We first define the concept of competitive forbearance and explain the cognitive process that leads to forbearance. Additionally, we empirically demonstrate that competitive forbearances and acts are driven by different reasons, which suggests that acts and forbearances are qualitatively distinct and complementary in a strategist's competitive repertoire. Finally, we show the implications of competitive forbearance for competitive dynamics research by proposing novel propositions about competitive behavior of firms. We examine competitive forbearance in a basketball coaching setting using an inductive, qualitative research of 841 decisions that basketball coaches have made during 15 basketball games.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".