Market Positioning by IT Service Vendors Through Imitation
Authors: Ruckman, Karen; Saraf, Nilesh; Sambamurthy, Vallabh
Journal: Information Systems Research (2015)
<jats:p> Information technology (IT) services vendors operate in a highly competitive but also institutional environment that render their service-line offerings mutually observable. This suggests that imitation of rivals’ decisions can be an efficient means for IT vendors when reconfiguring their service-line offerings. To explore how such imitation unfolds in this sector, we estimate a series of logistic regression models of 116 IT vendors’ service-line choices over three time periods. First, from the strategic imitation literature we identify the key imitation “referents,” which is a group of firms or a single firm with specific traits, and we test the relative influence of each referent. All of our analysis includes these referents as predictors of service-line choice. Next, we tested more nuanced models using theoretically guided subsamples as follows. One, based on information systems (IS) literature, we consider the IT vendors as embedded in three distinct “institutional spheres,” each corresponding to a knowledge domain, namely, technical, functional, and vertical industry domains. We separately examine imitation in each subsample corresponding to the three types of servic…