Corporate Strategy, Conformism, and the Stock Market
研究发现产品差异化会降低股价对增长机会价值的反映效率，导致经理人依赖股价信息时决策效率下降，这种信息成本促使企业产品市场战略趋同，且上市后企业差异化程度会提高。
We show that product differentiation reduces the informativeness of a firm’s stock price (or its peers’ stock prices) about the value of its growth opportunities. This results in less efficient exercise of a firm’s growth options when managers rely on information in stock prices for their decisions. This informational cost of differentiation induces conformity in product market strategies and is larger for private firms. Hence, a firm should differentiate more after going public. We confirm this prediction empirically and show that the post-IPO increase in differentiation is stronger for firms with better informed managers or less informative peers’ stock prices.Received January 19, 2016; editorial decision May 8, 2018 by Editor Itay Goldstein. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix, which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online.