Do firms respond to tougher competition by searching for completely new technological solutions (exploration), or do they work to defend their position by improving current technologies (exploitation)? Considering the different times to fruition for exploration versus exploitation, in the presence of heightened competition, we argue that firms might not be able to wait for the benefits of technological exploration to materialize. With a panel data set of U.S. manufacturing firms, we show that tougher competition, due to import penetration, leads to a decrease in technological exploration and an increase in technological exploitation. These effects are heterogeneous across industries, firms, and time. To obtain exogenous variation in competition we rely on both instrumental variable regressions and a difference-in-differences design exploiting large changes in import tariffs.

中文翻译：

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手中的鸟胜过丛林中的两只：技术搜索策略和进口渗透引起的竞争

公司是通过寻找全新的技术解决方案（探索）来应对更激烈的竞争，还是通过改进现有技术（开发）来努力捍卫自己的地位？考虑到探索与开发的不同时间，在竞争加剧的情况下，我们认为公司可能无法等待技术探索的好处实现。使用美国制造企业的面板数据集，我们表明，由于进口渗透，竞争更加激烈，导致技术探索的减少和技术开发的增加。这些影响因行业、公司和时间而异。