Product market competition and real activities manipulation: Theory and implications

We investigate how a firm manipulates its real activities in production to meet the earnings target in product market competition against its product-market rivals. We show that the equilibratory way to reach the earnings target is to set a higher first-period output level, reaching a higher short-term profit level. However, once the expected level of demand uncertainty is high, a firm will exploit this effect on its output choice by taking a mixed strategy and raising its short-term output level. This result suggests that one should consider longer-horizon paths of variables to detect opportunistic real activities manipulation.