THE INFLUENCE OF A FIRM'S BASIC CHARACTERISTICS ON THE RELEVANCE OF THE SOURCES AND FORMS OF COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE IN SLOVENIAN FIRMS

The process of competition among firms can be described as a causal-consecutive sequence "sources of competitive advantage. forms of competitive advantage. performance". The scientific literature usually discusses four basic schools about the sources of competitive advantage of a firm, namely the industrial organization school, the resource-based school, the capability-based school, and the knowledge-based school. Although the competitive advantage can take many different forms they can all be roughly classified into only two groups, i.e. the price advantage and the differentiation advantage. In our empirical research (based on a sample of 225 Slovenian firms) we examine how sources and forms of competitive advantage differ among different groups of firms where these groups are defined according to the firms' basic characteristics such as sector, size, age, type and nationality of ownership, and sales markets. It can be concluded that these characteristics mostly have little influence on the sources and forms of competitive advantage, although some statistically significant differences, especially with regard to a firms' size, type of ownership, and sales markets, do exist.