10/03/2025
By Qianlei Chen

The Department of Marketing, Entrepreneurship, and Innovation (MEI) in the Manning School of Business invites you to a doctoral dissertation proposal by Charley Qianlei Chen, a Ph.D. candidate, whose doctoral program concentration is marketing. All interested students and faculty members are warmly invited to attend.

Date: Friday, Oct. 17, 2025
Time: 10:30 a.m. – noon
Location: Hybrid, Pulichino Tong Business Building (PTB) 462 or via Zoom
Thesis/Dissertation Title: Three Essays on Coopetition

Committee Members

  • Sunny Li Sun (Co-chair), Associate Professor, Department of MEI, Manning School of Business, UMass Lowell
  • Cindy Yuerong Liu (Co-chair), Assistant Professor, Department of MEI, Manning School of Business, UMass Lowell
  • Spencer Ross, Associate Professor, Department of MEI, Manning School of Business, UMass Lowell
  • Yasuhiro Yamakawa, Associate Professor, Babson College

Abstract:
This dissertation proposal covers three essays. The first essay provides a literature review and theoretical synthesis of coopetition research from 1995 to 2025. It also presents a bibliometric main path analysis, a new approach, and an integrative theoretical model to disclose the research path and critical articles, and a perspective to address conceptual fuzziness in prior research.

The second essay examines the impact of niche market leaders, represented by privately-owned firms emerging in industrial clusters, to the survival of different types of actors like foreign or state-owned firms in a business ecosystem in China. The research uses a panel dataset spanning from 1998 to 2015 with more than 4 million observations of various types of industrial firms. The survival analysis reveals that, due to niche leader’s coopetitive strategy in adapting to the ecosystem, its growing number makes an inverted-U shaped impact to the exit hazards of both FOEs and SOEs, and these two impacts are different in the trend from suppressing to benefitting.

The third essay also explores the interfirm coopetition in a small context. Based on a survey of small and medium size manufacturers that are all located and competing within a cluster, the research uncovers that firm’s size is negatively associated with firm’s intention to carry out coopetitive activities, and the size difference between a pair of firms also has negative effect to the sustained occurrence of coopetition within the cluster.