Shareholder activists are investors who leverage their ownership in a company to push for change.

When those activists target a company, they usually want managers to change strategy, cut costs, improve performance or address issues such as climate change and worker rights. If managers resist, activists may seek board seats, call for leadership changes or criticize the company.

When one company is under fire, its competitors may fear that they’re next. Their managers may respond by cutting costs, changing strategies or making public promises even before an activist investor shows up at their door.

In other words, shareholder activism can create what our team of business school professors calls “collateral impact”: a domino effect in which pressure on one company changes what its competitors are doing.

Consider what happened after a small activist investor, which owned only a 0.02% stake in Exxon Mobil, successfully pushed the company in 2021 to take its climate commitments more seriously. Many of its oil industry rivals, including Chevron, set more ambitious goals for lowering their carbon emissions soon after.

Something similar happened in tech.

In 2022, activist investor Altimeter Capital targeted Meta, the company that owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, claiming it was hiring too many employees and investing too heavily in the metaverse, an immersive online technology. Meta responded by cutting thousands of jobs and investing less in the metaverse.

Shortly after, Amazon announced its own big round of cost-cutting and layoffs – although no investor activists had targeted it on similar issues.

While these moves may appear to be separate decisions made by some of the biggest publicly traded corporations in response to different issues, our study in the Journal of Business Research, published in May 2026, suggests they are part of a larger pattern. We found that when one company changes course in response to activist pressure, its competitors........

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