The performance of firms depends not just on the structure of the industries in which they compete but also on their relative positioning within those industries, in terms of operating within particular niches. We propose that demand for these niches depends endogenously on the historical ecology of the products offered: Niches become saturated-reduced in their ability to support products-as a large number of previous offerings allows the audience to satisfy its desire for products of a particular type. Analyzing the survival rates of television series aired in the United States from 1946 to 2003, we found that the survival rates of future entrants fell with the extensiveness of recent offerings in the niche, and that the negative association between crowding and survival also weakened with this saturation.

Many legalized markets bear categorical stigma—a vilifying label attached to an industry and its participants—that threatens their performance and survival chances. This happens because audiences avoid engagement with stigmatized organizations to minimize the probability of stigma transfer. Although scholars have explored what strategies stigmatized companies undertake to mitigate their stigma, we know very little about whether and how audiences’ acceptance of stigmatized organizations actually happens and if industry-level processes play a role in this acceptance. We develop a theory of identity exposure predicting that customers will become less concerned about stigma transfer when stigmatized organizations unambiguously reveal their identities by publicly advocating and celebrating their business and when vanguard customers openly discuss stigmatized organizations and their products in public forums. We find support for our theorizing in the analyses of customers’ concerns about stigma in Weedmaps.com —a marijuana-based community—from its inception in 2008 through 2014. Ultimately, our findings and extensive robustness checks suggest that identity exposure within stigmatized industries can alleviate customers’ concerns about stigma transfer and in this way accelerate the market destigmatization process.

The theory of resource partitioning proposes that competition among generalists in the center of a market can trigger a process of resource release that engenders a proliferation of specialist producers outside the center. Previous research has generally examined the relationship between this proliferation and market concentration-a correlate of competitive intensity in the center of the market.In this paper, we extend the theory by arguing that resource release also occurs as the degree of competitive overlap among producers in the center intensifies, even when concentration or other structural features do not vary; we expand its implications by demonstrating that increased competitive overlap in the market center can enhance the viability of producers positioned near the center more than those in the periphery; and we enrich and complete it by specifying the additional assumptions needed to extend the theory of resource partitioning to entry competitive overlap similarly stimulates the entry of near-center stations more than peripheral ones.JEL classification: L25, L82, Z13.

The market fate of a product ultimately determines the success or failure of a firm. A name is a central feature of any product, yet how names affect product market longevity is not well understood. In this paper we develop a theory in which a new product’s name affects the product’s categorization by audiences and, as a result, impacts its survival chances on the market. We predict that the similarity of the new product’s name to names of other products in the industry affects its survival probability, but the direction and magnitude of this effect depends on the popularity and status of products, to names of which the new product’s name is similar. We test our predictions on the population of all TV programs that were introduced during prime time plus early evening and late night on networks in the United States from the beginning of the industry in 1944 through 2003. An event history analysis of this population supports our predictions and thus suggests the importance of names in product market viability.