دانلود رایگان مقاله کارشناسان یا رقبا تقلید و افشای داوطلبانه

ABSTRACT

This study explores the effect of firm experience and competition on individual firms' motivation to imitate the voluntary disclosure practices of reference firms in product markets. Using Spain's newspaper industry from 1966 to 1993, the empirical findings show that the more experienced firms are, the less likely they are to imitate the disclosure practices of other better-informed organizations. Likewise, more experienced firms show a lower propensity to follow the disclosure practices adopted by the firms on their business segment. By contrast, firms operating in more competitive markets have greater incentives to mimic the disclosure behavior of rival organizations. This article concludes that firm experience and the degree of competition in the market are likely to moderate a firm's incentives to imitate the voluntary disclosure practices of other organizations. Furthermore, the results indicate that the effects of these two factors are not mutually exclusive but rather complementary.

6. Conclusions and discussion

This study proposes that firm experience and the level of competition in the product market moderate an individual firm's incentives to imitate voluntary disclosure practices of other organizations. To test the hypotheses, this study uses the newspaper industry in Spain from 1966 to 1993 as an empirical setting and focuses on the analysis of individual firms' decisions of whether to disclose audited information about their daily circulation figures (i.e., number of newspapers sold). Overall, the empirical evidence shows that both firm experience and the level of market competition are likely to drive an individual firm's incentives to imitate the voluntary disclosure practices of other organizations. The results indicate that firm experience moderates the imitation of voluntary disclosure practices regardless of the type of imitation pattern (i.e., linear or non-linear). Previous research on the imitation of voluntary disclosure actions indicates that an inverted Ushaped relationship between the actions of other organizations and an individual firm's probability of disclosure can be explained by the accumulation of public knowledge in the market (e.g., Nikolaeva & Bicho, 2011). However, the findings suggest that a firm's incentives to imitate depend not only on this type of common or public knowledge but also on the experience of firms at the individual level. In other words, a firm's incentives to imitate the actions of other organizations for informational reasons might decrease at a certain point; however, this point and the rate of decrease are not the same for all firms, as they depend on each firm's experience. Similarly, the results show that the level of market competition moderates (i.e., increases) a firm's incentives to imitate the voluntary disclosure practices of other organizations. Moreover, empirical evidence indicates that, as suggested by prior work on the imitation of other business practices, firm experience and the level of competition are not mutually exclusive but complementary.