Multimarket Contact and Long-Term Oriented Language in Competition

Corporate disclosure has long served as a strategic tool for managing the perceptions of audiences that shape a firm’s access to resources. Prior research has largely focused on why firms use disclosure to engage capital-market constituents such as investors and analysts, leaving open the question of when and why firms disclose for competitive purposes. Focusing on the temporal orientation of competitive strategy communication, we examine how multimarket contact (MMC) shapes firms’ use of long-term oriented language (LTL). We argue that greater MMC raises the risk of cross-market retaliation, strengthening firms’ incentives to signal a restrained competitive posture through LTL, particularly when competitive capacity is visibly constrained by poor financial performance or analyst downgrade revisions. Using a sample of 36 U.S. manufacturing firms across six industries from 2015 to 2024, we find evidence generally consistent with our predictions.