Intraindustry structure and the ease of strategic change

There has been considerable recent work in industrial organization emphasizing the importance of group stratification within industries. The thrust of this literature is that in empirical work, and in particular in investigating public policy problems, differences across firms within an industry may be crucial. This paper is intended as a contribution to the empirical literature of group structures. In this paper, I examine patterns of strategic group membership in a number of industries, and analyze changes in the strategies used by firms. In particular, I provide a series of rather simple exploratory tests of the importance of intraindustry strategic differences in a number of industries.