Considerable interest centers around the strategic consequences of competition from informal (unregistered) firms. In this vein, McCann and Bahl (2017) build on the attention-based view to argue that informal competition is positively associated with new product development by formal firms and this relationship is weakened by formal competition, prevalence of irregular payments, and optimism about the regulatory environment. With the goal of advancing knowledge accumulation, we reexamine McCann and Bahl’s (2017) research model by conducting a series of studies, including an exact replication of the original investigation and reexamining their findings across time and space. Our findings reveal that while the original research model is well-supported in an exact replication, its temporal and spatial generalizability is limited. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.
