The Role of Cognitive Opportunity Structures in Market Contestation

By adopting a behavioral perspective on stakeholder activism, our proposal investigates the biases that the cognitive structure of a market may induce into the stakeholders’ propensity to attack a specific segment of that market. We claim that whether stakeholders perceive a focal segment to exhibit a disproportionate level of negative attributes, and therefore decide that it deserves to become a target of contestation, crucially depends on the benchmark that is used to compare with the focal segment. We test our theory in the US food retail industry and examine the extent of contestation in 35 food categories between 2006 and 2015. Our preliminary results support the argument that contestation emerges as the result of a boundedly rather than perfectly rational decision making process.