Too Little, Too Early: Introduction Timing and New Product Performance in the Personal Digital Assistant Industry

The authors address the following key questions: (1) When should a firm introduce a new product? (2) What should its performance level be? and (3) How do the decisions of a competing firm affect a firm's timing and product performance decisions? The authors present a detailed case study of the initial competitors in the personal digital assistant (PDA) industry on the basis of which they construct a stylized game-theoretic model of entry timing and product performance level decisions in a duopoly. Situations in which the duopolists are symmetric as well as asymmetric in terms of their estimates of market size and product development capabilities are considered. When firms are symmetric, th…