| What is competitor intelligence? | Competitive intelligence tracks the activity of direct and indirect competitors in a range of fields: general business activity, business development, strategy and tactics in different sectors or new activities (sometimes designed to confuse and mislead), market penetration, patent registration, research activity and so on. |
| What is business wargaming? | Business wargaming is an experiential group exercise where an organization can pressure test an existing strategy. Business war games help you create new plans and ideas by role-playing the competitors’ strategy before making full-scale investments. Wargaming shakes things up, challenges norms, and takes a fresh look at the market through the lens of other key players. |
| Game theory: Action and reaction. How does strategy choices interact with the competitors? And why is game theory helpful to predict competitors move? | Strategy choices interact with those of competitors. This suggests that each needs to consider not only their own moves, but also their competitors’ likely or potential counter-moves. Considering how your moves may cause competitors to react has implications for your choices i.e. your strategy.
Game theory is particularly important where competitors are strongly inter-dependent (temporarily or permanently)
Interdependence exists where the outcome of choices made by one player is strongly dependent on the choices made by others. Here anticipating counter-moves is vital to a strategy’s success
Game theory helps reveal which competitor moves are more likely. |
| What is the prisoners dilemma? | The "prisoner's dilemma" is a concept that describes a situation in which two people have competing incentives that lead them to choose a suboptimal outcome.
Prisoners dilemma: Both win if they both keep their mouth shut. Each win if they blame the other without reciprocation.
Example (See pic): Success of price cut depends on the responses of rivals: if rivals do not match, the price-cutter gains market share; but if rivals follow the price cuts, nobody gains market share and all players suffer from the lower prices. |
