An Investigation of the Sources of Store-Based Retailers' Early Entrant Advantages: Market and Resource Factors

The focus in this study is to explore the sources of the potential early entrant advantages in retailing markets. Are the sources of retailers' early entrant advantages external market factors, internal resource factors, neither, or both of these two types of factors? The results show that for store-based consumer electronics retailers, early entrant advantages result from two factors: non-firm-specific factors unique to the retailing industry subfield of consumer electronics retailing and firm-specific operations capability factors. However, in this study, firm-specific advertising capability factors did not seem to make any significant contribution to early entrant advantages.