The Hoberg and Phillips Text Based Industry Classifications have a spatial representation. All firms have a location in a product market space shaped as a unit sphere. Competitive product markets are areas of the sphere where many firms are located. Concentrated areas are sparsely populated.

Some regions of the product space have no firms residing there, as some text descriptions of products would describe products with no demand, such as the word combination: "eggs", "paint" and "gardening".

The best way to tap the full research power of this product market grid is to use the Text-based Network Industry Classifications (TNIC), which is a network way of identifying competitors to each firm. Competitors are firms residing in close proximity in product space to each firm based on a continuous measure of similarity. Another key benefit of TNIC industries is that industry composition is updated annually, and our own research indicates that the product market space itself thus dynamically changes over time. As a result, static fixed-location FIC classifications miss out on much of the picture.

Hoberg and Phillips
Data Library

Robert H. Smith School of Business
University of Maryland
Van Munching Hall
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742-1815