03/26/2026
By Qianlei Chen

The Department of Marketing, Entrepreneurship, and Innovation (MEI) at the Manning School of Business invites you to a doctoral dissertation defense 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: Thursday, April 9, 2026
Time: 2 – 3:20 p.m.
Location (hybrid mode): Pulichino Tong Business Building 205 or via Zoom.

Dissertation Title: Three Essays on Coopetition

Committee Members

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

Abstract:
This dissertation covers three essays. The first essay presents a literature review and theoretic synthesis of coopetition research from 1995 to 2025. It also does a bibliometric Main Path Analysis, an integrative theoretic model to disclose the research path and critical articles; it suggests a new approach from coopetition-initiator view and a novel perspective to address conceptual fuzziness in prior literature about true competition and value creation/appropriation.

The second essay examines the impact of niche leaders, represented by privately-owned enterprises leading in industrial clusters, on the survival of different types of business actors like foreign- or state-owned enterprises (FOEs or SOEs) in a nationwide ecosystem in China. The research takes a survival analysis method to study a panel dataset spanning from 1998 to 2015 with more than 4 million observations of various types of industrial firms. The analysis reveals that, due to the niche leader’s coopetitive strategy to grow in and adapt to the ecosystem, its increasing number makes an inverted-U shaped impact on the exit hazards of both FOEs and SOEs. However, two impacts have different inflection points, showing that a smaller number of niche leaders can reverse exit hazards from an increasing trend to decreasing for FOE than for SOE.

The third essay continues to explore the coopetitive interfirm relationships in the generative artificial intelligence (AI) ecosystem for a period from the ChatGPT launch to January 2026. This qualitative processual research integrates Event System Theory and Event Structure Analysis to examine causal relations of 40 business events involved with OpenAI, Anthropic, and the Magnificent Seven. It identifies four distinctive event chains, two rival constellations, three nuanced keystone role pursuits, and five theoretic propositions. These propositions speak to the triggering impact of disruptive technology, the strategies of coopetition and role transition in ecosystem, and the value-aligning mechanism behind the equity-for-capacity swaps between AI model labs and investors.