Busby, Jeremy Simon (2019) The co-evolution of competition and parasitism in the resource-based view : a risk model of product counterfeiting. European Journal of Operational Research, 276 (1). pp. 300-313. ISSN 0377-2217
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Abstract
The primary concern in the resource-based view of the firm has been competition. For many firms, however, the relevant ecology includes parasites as well as competitors – notably product counterfeiters who parasitically exploit a firm’s reputational resource. This parasitic process both diminishes the reputational resource it exploits, and produces significant risk of harm as a by-product. This article extends the resource-based view, presenting an account of the mechanism by which competition and parasitism co-evolve and produce a distinctive form of resource erosion. It does so using a model which, because a firm’s reputational resource exists distributedly in the minds of mutually-influencing but not centrally-coordinated consumers, takes an agent-based approach. This model then naturally forms a basis for the probabilistic risk assessment of the consequences of parasitism – particularly the harm that arises from the counterfeiting of safety critical products such as pharmaceuticals. The intended contribution is to show how the resource-based view can be extended to reflect the fact that heterogeneous resource distribution is implicated in parasitism as much as competition, and to show how a model of the underlying mechanisms can support risk analysis.