Why Has It Been So Hard to Define Competitive Advantage?

Jay B. Barney, Tyson B. Mackey and Alison Mackey

Strategic Management Review, 2023, vol. 4, issue 1, 1-13

Abstract: Why is it so hard to define competitive advantage? Should this difficulty lead us to discard the concept in strategic management scholarship? While Lieberman (2021) advocates largely abandoning competitive advantage in lieu of developing empirical measures of superior firm performance, we argue that these efforts will face the same challenges that efforts to develop a definition of competitive advantage have faced. Instead, this paper calls on strategy scholars to reconsider certain concepts imported from economics (e.g., industry, firm, and firm performance) as they may not be consistent with strategic management's emphasis on why some economic agents outperform others. Adopting alternative conceptions of these components of the competitive process may make it easier to resolve the definitional issues raised by Lieberman (2021).

Keywords: Competitive advantage; superior firm performance; industry; firm; theory of the firm (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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