Interfirm competitive relationships can vary in their extent of market contact with different implications for interfirm competitive aggressiveness. However, to model the totality of industry competition structures, connecting all these (dyadic) MMC ties together further complicates the story by revealing an emergent MMC network. In this approach, both social network theory and industry competition phenomena suggest the need for understanding group-level MMC for investigating interdependent behavioral outcomes and structural antecedents, which is the purpose of this study. Drawing on Simmelian triadic theory, we predict that a firm’s embeddedness in groups of three competitors that are each pairwise connected by MMC (i.e., triadic MMC) constrains the firm’s competitive aggressiveness. Nevertheless, these MMC triad structures are not as stable as their constraining effect on conduct would imply due to the adversarial type of relationship and conduct among the group members, leading to MMC group instability and continual recreation from firms’ competitive maneuvering. We find support for our predictions in the turbulent environmental context of the converging U.S. information technology sector, 2010-2016, combining industry-agnostic samples of competitive relations and conduct dynamics.
