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Managerial Optimism in a Competitive Market
Author(s) -
Jiang Baojun,
Liu Chang
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
production and operations management
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.279
H-Index - 110
eISSN - 1937-5956
pISSN - 1059-1478
DOI - 10.1111/poms.12952
Subject(s) - optimism , duopoly , profit (economics) , business , competition (biology) , quality (philosophy) , microeconomics , marketing , product differentiation , product market , industrial organization , market competition , economics , market economy , psychology , social psychology , ecology , philosophy , epistemology , cournot competition , incentive , biology
Research has shown that many managers and entrepreneurs tend to be optimistic and are inclined to believe that negative shocks happen to them less frequently than to others. However, there is also evidence suggesting that such optimism is often inaccurate in reality and managerial optimism can lead to the failure of a company. We develop a game‐theoretic model to investigate the impact of managerial optimism on firms’ performance in a competitive market. Our analysis shows that a manager's optimism about demand can increase the firm's profit. Moreover, only one firm having managerial optimism can be win–win for both firms in a duopoly, because it can increase the level of product quality differentiation between the firms, alleviating price competition. However, if both firms have optimistic managers, the benefit of increased differentiation disappears, and firms are weakly worse off, compared with the case of both firms having realistic managers. Our research suggests that a firm should hire a realistic manager when managerial optimism is already pervasive in a competitive market.