“The Great American Competitive Disadvantage: Fact or Fiction?”: A Reply

Abstract

In their comment on “The Great American Competitive Disadvantage: Fact or Fiction?”, D. Ricks, M. Czinkota, and G. DeJesus point out several criticisms of share analysis, especially those made by Houston [2] and Richardson [3, 4], and suggest that perhaps share analysis may be too suspect to be of much use. Because these issues—together with several other caveats on the use of share analysis—may have an influence on the results obtained, they are discussed in my article for the benefit of readers who are not familiar with the share-analysis technique. However, in their note, Ricks, Czinkota, and DeJesus fail to consider the reply made by Ashby [1] to the issues raised by Houston nor do they recognize that Richardson concludes his article by suggesting several ways to improve the results of share analysis rather than advocating that the method should not be used at all [3].