Do first movers have the advantage? empirical study of Taiwan's semiconductor industry

While the preemptive advantages of first movers have met with wide approval from scholars, some also agree that late entrants may gain competitive edges through catch-up strategies and accumulation of resources. Unlike the single-period performance evaluation adopted in the past, this paper employed the Malmquist productivity index (MPI) to analyze data from the Taiwan Economic Journal Data Bank (TEJ) between 2007 and 2011 to investigate the dynamic business performance of first movers in and later entrants to the Taiwanese semiconductor industry. Bootstrap confidence intervals were used to verify the significance of the MPI. Our results indicate that late entrants to the Taiwanese semiconductor industry display better performance and higher productivity change than first movers.