How Music Theory Can Inform Competitive Dynamics: Anticipatory Awareness and Successful Preemption

Competitive dynamics (CD) research has long relied on the awareness-motivation-capability (AMC) framework to analyze competitive actions and responses. Rooted in the stimulus-response model from social cognition research, the AMC framework unsurprisingly emphasizes a focal firm’s ex post (i.e., emergent) awareness of a rival’s attack as the requisite stimulus for a focal firm’s competitive response. We extend both the AMC model and the CD literature by considering the competitive relevance of an alternative stimulus: a focal firm’s anticipatory awareness of rivals’ intentions. To elaborate the process by which anticipatory awareness can manifest itself, we advance a novel conceptual framework rooted in music theory (tonal harmony and rhythm perspectives) to explain how a listener, by recognizing consonance and dissonance in musical notes and patterns in timing, can anticipate what will come next. We apply our framework to discuss ways in which a focal firm can develop anticipatory awareness vis-à-vis competitor intentions, and we link this alternative stimulus to an under-researched but managerially important response that is also anticipatory: successful preemption. We conclude with a discussion of the multiple uses and extensions of our theoretical framework for research and practice on anticipated interactions between firms and their rivalrous (and non-rivalrous) counterparts.