Disadvantaged Early Entrants? Entry Order Effects on Product Performance

Most empirical work on entry order supports the notion that early entrants outperform later entrants, although differing views have also been expressed. There is also a growing consensus in the academia, that current measures of firm performance used in the entry order literature to study these advantages are inadequate. This explorative study analyzes the relationship between entry order and customer evaluations, which, depicting the performance of the firm's products in the market, are used as a proxy for firm performance. The study is set in the digital camera industry, analyzing entries into each new technology level, in terms of the resolution of bridge and DSLR cameras. The results contradict the prevailing consensus on early entry advantages, instead indicating that very late entrants outperform all earlier entrants in the bridge category.