Divergent Reactions to Convergent Strategies: Investor Beliefs and Analyst Reactions During Technological Change
研究了技术变革导致行业融合时，证券分析师对来自不同行业但采取相似战略的企业的反应差异，发现分析师对有线电视公司比电信公司更积极，这种分歧源于投资者对增长和利润的不同偏好，并随时间推移而缩小。
An important outcome of technological change is industry “convergence,” as a new technology spurs competition between established firms from different industries. We study the reactions of securities analysts, as important sources of institutional pressures for firms, to the similar product/market strategies undertaken by firms from different prior industries responding to industry convergence. Our empirical setting is the convergence between the wireline telecommunications and cable television industries in the period following the advent of voice over Internet protocol technology. Controlling for firm financial performance and capabilities, we find that analysts were consistently more positive toward the cable firms than toward the wireline telecom firms. Our findings further show that this divergence in reactions arises from differences in existing investor expectations and preferences concerning how firms create value; stocks owned by investors with a greater preference for growth receive more positive reactions than those owned by investors with a greater preference for margins. However, this divergence in reactions shrinks over time as convergence unfolds and as investors shift their shareholdings in response to misalignment between their preferences and firms' strategic changes. Reactions from analysts—reflecting inertial expectations of investors—may persist for a time despite changes to firms' strategies, thus creating challenges for some firms in responding to technological change and industry convergence while legitimating and enabling similar responses from their competitors.