U.S. COMPETITIVENESS AND THE SECONDARY AUTO MARKET

The primary objective of this article is to explore the competitiveness of domestic versus foreign firms based on evidence in the U.S. used‐car market. The declining competitiveness of U.S. manufacturing has been typified by the performance of the automobile industry. During the past two decades, Japanese and German automakers dominated global competition and gained substantial shares of the U.S. market. Transcending these developments has been a resurgence of the Big Three's (GM, Ford and Chrysler) competitive positions in recent years. Arguably, these advances were attributable to the practice of total quality management (TQM) philosophy.