an institution based view of international business strategy a focus on emerging economies leveraging the recent research interest in emerging economies this perspective paper argues that an institution based view of international business ib strategy has emerged it is positioned as one leg that helps sustain the strategy tripod the other two legs consisting of the industry and resource based views we then review four diverse areas of substantive research 1 antidumping as entry barriers 2 competing in and out of india 3 growing the firm in china and 4 governing the corporation in emerging economies overall we argue that an institution based view of ib strategy in combination with industry and resource based views will not only help sustain a strategy tripod but also shed significant light on the most fundamental questions confronting ib such as what drives firm strategy and performance in ib

competition cooperation and innovation organizational arrangements for regimes of rapid technological progress abstract discussions of the link between firm size and innovation are outmoded because the boundaries of the firm have become fuzzy in recent decades strategic alliances constellations of bilateral agreements among firms are increasingly necessary to support innovative activities such alliances can facilitate complex coordination beyond what the price system can accomplish while avoiding the dysfunctional properties sometimes associated with hierarchy antitrust law and competition policy need to recognize that these new organizational forms are often the functional antithesis of cartels though they may have certain structural similarities a more complete understanding of bilateral contracts and agreements ought to reveal when and how cooperation can support rather than impede innovation and competition

creation adoption and diffusion of innovations by subsidiaries of multinational corporations this paper reports some of the findings of a multi phased and multi method study on the organizational attributes that facilitate creation adoption and diffusion of innovations by subsidiaries of multinational companies comparison of results obtained through case research in nine companies multiple respondent questionnaire surveys in three companies and a single respondent survey in 66 north american and european multinationals reveal unambiguous and positive impacts of normative integration through organizational socialization and dense intra and inter unit communication on an mnc subsidiary s ability to contribute to the different innovation tasks the findings are less consistent with regard to the effects of local resources and autonomy and it appears that the influences of these two attributes are strongly mediated by the levels of normative integration and organizational communication

the liability of localness in innovation i analyze differences in the innovativeness of domestic firms and subsidiaries of foreign firms operating in the same country i argue that domestic firms suffer a liability of localness in innovation or a competitive disadvantage in product innovation relative to subsidiaries of foreign firms i propose that this liability of localness is driven by the relatively lower levels of multiculturalism in employees of domestic firms in comparison with subsidiaries which limit the identification transfer and integration of a large diversity of knowledge that supports product innovation i also propose that managers of domestic firms can compensate for this liability of localness in two ways by investing in the training of their employees and by exporting training modifies the mindsets and abilities of employees and enables them to become more cognitively multicultural which facilitates product innovation exporting changes employees mindsets as they become exposed to new ideas available abroad which also facilitates product innovation i test these arguments on a sample of manufacturing firms and find that although domestic firms introduce fewer new products than subsidiaries of foreign firms they introduce more new products than subsidiaries at the same level of investment in language training and of exports

an empirical examination of multinational corporate capital structure this paper examines whether there are systematic differences in the traditional capital structure determinants between mncs and dcs and if there are additional uniquely international factors that may help explain the capital structure choice of multinational corporations the results suggest that specific international factors such as political risk and exchange rate risk are relevant to the multinational capital structure decision that multinationals have higher agency costs than purely domestic firms and that international diversification does not lower earnings volatility for multinational corporations

political decentralization economic growth and regional disparities in the oecd ezcurra r and rodriguez pose a political decentralization economic growth and regional disparities in the oecd regional studies recent scholarly work has addressed whether decentralization affects economic growth and regional disparities by typically resorting to fiscal decentralization while disregarding political decentralization indices this article covers this gap by investigating the association between different political decentralization indices with two measures of economic performance changes in gross domestic product gdp per capita and in territorial inequalities the results suggest a lack of statistical relationship between political decentralization and economic growth regardless of how political decentralization is measured in the case of regional disparities the results depend on the index used and range from the absence of a link to a positive association between both factors ezcurra r and rodriguez pose a oecd

the past is prologue moving on from culture s consequences in this article we examine the theoretical and empirical understanding of culture within the international business discipline post the publication of kirkman lowe gibson 2006 in their paper kirkman et al 2006 provide a comprehensive retrospective on the impact of hofstede s seminal publication culture s consequences in addition to looking at what followed on from hofstede they laid out a research program they believed was necessary to move the study of culture forward unfortunately in their current review published in this issue they outlined how little if any of their thoughtful guidance was taken to heart in our perspective we believe that this signals that the study and use of culture in the international business field has become stuck in a theoretical and methodological rut and more radical thinking is necessary if we are going to advance beyond more of the same science that simply reiterates repeatedly that that culture matters without any coherent advancement of the key role that it plays in the international arena

choice of foreign market entry mode impact of ownership location and internalization factors firms interested in servicing foreign markets face a difficult decision with regards to the choice of an entry mode the options available to a firm include exporting licensing joint venture and sole venture several factors that determine the choice of a specific foreign market entry mode have been identified in previous literature these factors can be classified into three categories ownership advantages of a firm location advantages of a market and internalization advantages of integrating transactions this study examines the independent and joint influences of these factors on the choice of an entry mode multinomial logistic regression model is employed to test the hypothesized effects

the impact of culture on the strategy of multinational enterprises does national origin affect ownership decisions this paper tests the proposition that national origin affects the strategies of multinational enterprises by looking at the determinants of the choice they make between entering the united states through partially versus wholly owned subsidiaries we pool entries into the united states made by firms based in two countries japan and finland which differ both in their cultural characteristics and in their cultural distance to the united states after carefully controlling for the known firm and industry level determinants of subsidiary ownership strategies we find that cultural distance between the home base of the investor and the target country or perhaps political risk exerts a powerful influence on ownership of subsidiaries but cultural characteristics of the home base do not

solving the single country sample problem in cultural distance studies selecting appropriate samples in cultural distance research is vital to producing valid empirical results over 80 of empirical cultural distance studies use a sample comprised of either a single home country with varying host countries or a single host country with varying home countries when difference scores are used in the calculation of cultural distance based on single country samples the resulting cultural distance measures typically are highly correlated with one or more of the varying countries underlying national culture dimensions making it impossible to determine whether findings are due to cultural distance or to varying countries national culture effects this is referred to as a confounded variables problem and means that for an overwhelming number of cultural distance studies we cannot with certainty have confidence in the verity of their findings to resolve this uncertainty we propose that cultural distance scholars select samples comprised of at least two home host countries we empirically demonstrate that two country samples where most of the national culture dimensions for the two countries differ create certitude with respect to results eliminating the cultural distance confounded variables problem we describe the single country sample problem illustrate the proposed a priori two country solution and suggest avenues for future research

client profitability of diffusion segments across countries for multi generational innovations the influence of firm market and cross national differences there is scant research on the important managerial question of how to maximize returns on investments in either international business or international marketing literature we propose and test a conceptual framework using data from a large technology manufacturer service provider despite early adoption by innovators and early adopters the early majority segment is most profitable however the late majority segment and the early adopters segment are the next most profitable in the developed and emerging countries respectively we propose a decision support framework incorporating cross national distances on single generation and multi generation profitability for mnes offering multi generational products in multinational markets to be more profitable

research note multinational diffusion models an alternative framework the literature on cross national diffusion models is gaining increased importance today due to the needs of present day managers new product sales growth in a given nation or society is affected by many factors rogers 1995 and of these sociocontagion or word of mouth has been found to be the most important factor that characterizes the diffusion process bass 1969 moore 1995 hence it is interesting and perhaps challenging to analyze what would happen if a new product diffuses in parallel in two neighboring but culturally different countries not only will we expect the diffusion process in the two countries to be different but we will also expect some interaction among them especially if the two societies mingle with each other there are two streams of research in cross national diffusion the first type focuses on exploring the differences between diffusion processes in two countries and finding out whether those differences can be attributed to social and cultural differences between the countries involved examples of this type of research are found in takada and jain 1991 gatignon et al 1989 helsen et al 1993 and kumar et al 1998 these studies did find some relationship between the cultural differences of the countries studied and the differences in the diffusion process the second stream of research focuses on modeling explicitly the interaction between the diffusion processes in two countries the interaction is typically captured through lead lag effect eliashberg and helsen 1996 kalish et al 1995 where the sales process in the lead country i e the country where the product was first introduced is modeled to affect the sales process in the lag country i e the country where the product was introduced a few years later another method to study the interaction among the diffusion processes in two countries was suggested by putsis et al 1997 who used a mixing model to empirically explore the existence of such interactions these studies basically observed that when a new product is introduced early in one country and with a time lag in subsequent countries the consumers in the lag countries learn about the product from the lead country adopters resulting in a faster diffusion rate in the lag countries ganesh and kumar 1996 formulized this effect as the learning effect and subsequently ganesh et al 1997 found this learning effect to be influenced by country specific factors cultural similarity economic similarity and time lag elapsed between the lead and the lag countries and product specific factors continuous vs discontinuous innovation and the presence or absence of a standardized technology a careful analysis of the extant literature on the second stream of research would reveal that neither the learning effect model nor the mixing model can be modified to accommodate the other model our contribution to the literature exactly addresses this point in this paper an alternative framework is proposed that has two unique features first the framework is flexible enough to not only account for the lead country affecting the lag countries and vice versa but also to accommodate the simultaneous interaction among countries in explaining the diffusion processes in the countries concerned using multiple product categories and a variety of new product introduction situations we empirically demonstrate the flexibility and efficiency of our proposed framework we found strong evidence of all types of interactions namely lead lag lag lead and simultaneous which evidence suggests that one cannot afford to omit any of the interactions the second unique feature of our paper is the estimation procedure that we used because statistical estimation of a dynamic process that includes lead lag lag lead and simultaneous types of causality within a single framework is not straightforward we suggest an iterative estimation procedure for the estimation this new procedure not only proved to be flexible in accommodating different types of interaction but also converged rather quickly in all of the cases that we empirically tested noting that the statistical properties of these estimators are not generally available we carried out a simulation exercise that clearly revealed the efficiency of the proposed estimation procedure after analyzing the interaction we went further and showed that the magnitude of the cross national influences is affected by certain country specific and product specific factors the flexibility of the proposed method over the existing methods is demonstrated through obtaining superior forecasts with the proposed method several interesting insights for managers concerned with formulating international marketing strategies are offered

predicting the path of technological innovation saw vs moore bass gompertz and kryder competition is intense among rival technologies and success depends on predicting their future trajectory of performance to resolve this challenge managers often follow popular heuristics generalizations or laws such as moore s law we propose a model step and wait saw for predicting the path of technological innovation and we compare its performance against eight models for 25 technologies and 804 technologies years across six markets the estimates of the model provide four important results first moore s law and kryder s law do not generalize across markets neither holds for all technologies even in a single market second saw produces superior predictions over traditional methods such as the bass model or gompertz law and can form predictions for a completely new technology by incorporating information from other categories on time varying covariates third analysis of the model parameters suggests that i recent technologies improve at a faster rate than old technologies ii as the number of competitors increases performance improves in smaller steps and longer waits iii later entrants and technologies that have a number of prior steps tend to have smaller steps and shorter waits but iv technologies with a long average wait time continue to have large steps fourth technologies cluster in their performance by market

the dynamics of the liability of foreignness a global study of survival in financial services we study the impact of foreignness on survival in interbank currency trading worldwide over the period 1974 93 in particular we develop hypotheses on the behavior of the liability of foreignness over time and on the consequences of evolving sources of firm level competitive advantage on this liability we test these hypotheses on the population of 2667 market making trading rooms located in 47 countries worldwide that either existed in 1974 or entered the industry between 1974 and 1993 the results show that there is a liability of foreignness and that it changes over time further strategic and organizational factors such as the adoption of technology by these firms and their mode of internal control significantly influenced survival as did location related factors such as the intensity of local and foreign competition 1997 by john wiley sons ltd

the economics of organization the transaction cost approach the transaction cost approach to the study of economic organization regards the transaction as the basic unit of analysis and holds that an understanding of transaction cost economizing is central to the study of organizations applications of this approach require that transactions be dimensionalized and that alternative governance structures be described economizing is accomplished by assigning transactions to governance structures in a discriminating way the approach applies both to the determination of efficient boundaries as between firms and markets and to the organization of internal transactions including the design of employment relations the approach is compared and contrasted with selected parts of the organization theory literature

the effect of national culture on the choice of entry mode characteristics of national cultures have frequently been claimed to influence the selection of entry modes this article investigates this claim by developing a theoretical argument for why culture should influence the choice of entry two hypotheses are derived which relate culture to entry mode choice one focusing on the cultural distance between countries the other on attitudes towards uncertainty avoidance using a multinomial logit model and controlling for other effects the hypotheses are tested by analysing data on 228 entries into the united states market by acquisition wholly owned greenfield and joint venture empirical support for the effect of national culture on entry choice is found

psychic distance and organizational performance an empirical examination of international retailing operations we develop a reconceptualization and operationalization of psychic distance that broadens the concept we then empirically test this operationalization and investigate the relationship between psychic distance and organizational performance our results suggest that psychic distance as a summary construct explains a significant proportion of the variance in financial performance and strategic effectiveness however disaggregation of the construct substantially increases its explanatory power the results also support a psychic distance paradox where psychic distance has a positive relationship with organizational performance

foreign aid and government fiscal behaviour in low income south asian countries the major purpose of this study was to analyse the relationship between foreign aid and government fiscal behaviour using a pooled sample of three low income south asian countries pakistan india and sri lanka a simultaneous equation system was developed and estimated using nonlinear three stage least squares procedure the results confirm the hypothesis that foreign aid affects both the expenditure and the revenue side of the recipient government budgets both grants and loans are used for consumption as well as for investment purposes however grants leak into consumption more than loans thus if the purpose of aid is to generate investment it is more helpful if donors extend loans to the developing countries than by giving grants the results also indicate that both grants and loans increase the taxation effort multilateral aid actually pulls resources out of consumption and places them into investment projects thus the results confirm the assertion that a shift from bilateral to multilateral ai

national culture the missing country level determinant of corporate governance it is well known that firm level corporate governance practices vary mainly between rather than within countries but country level factors such as legal and financial institutions explain less than 50 of this cross country variation in this article we show that two dimensions of national culture individualism and uncertainty avoidance capture about 90 of the country fixed effects and outperform the country level explanatory variables used in prior literature we argue that culture works through a tradeoff between managerial expertise and certainty of control a tradeoff largely overlooked by prior literature that captures a country s preference for the anglo saxon approach versus the direct control approach for governance consistent with this argument we find that the effect of culture on corporate governance varies across firms with different needs for managerial expertise and certainty of control we also find that culture interacts with other factors to determine firm level governance

explaining the national cultural distance paradox past studies of the relationship between national cultural distance and entry mode choice have produced conflicting results some scholars find cultural distance associated with choosing wholly owned modes others find cultural distance linked to a preference for joint ventures in this paper we provide both theoretical and empirical evidence to explain the discrepant findings and thus help to resolve the national cultural distance paradox

the effect of cultural distance on entry mode choice international diversification and mne performance a meta analysis although a growing literature indicates that cultural distance that is differences between national cultures is an important determinant of organizational actions and performance both empirical and theoretical concerns abound in this study the relationships of cultural distance with entry mode choice international diversification and mne performance are examined by meta analyzing data from 66 independent samples with cumulative sample sizes ranging from 2 255 to 24 152 regression results failed to provide statistical evidence of significant relationships between cultural distance and entry mode choice international diversification and mne performance the examination of moderator effects however yielded important results we found a strong negative association between cultural distance and entry mode choice for us based mnes the cultural distance international diversification relationship was negative for high technology industries while it was positive for other industries cultural distance also had a strong positive effect on mne performance for developed country investments a similar strong positive relationship was found between cultural distance and international diversification in studies with more recent samples results of this study indicate that substantial additional research is needed before the role of cultural distance is fully understood

asia s materialists reconciling collectivism and materialism materialism has an ugly face the dominant view of materialism regards materialists as self prioritizing individuals who oppose collective and prosocial goals in favor of a lifestyle led by money possessions and status the present research argues that there is a side of materialism that is concerned with collective oriented interests we examine the nature and consequences of collective oriented materialism the belief system that ascribes importance to possessions for their symbolic and signaling capacities to construct desirable social attributes drawing from cultural and consumer theories we find considerable support that materialists espouse a collective oriented quality to an otherwise self oriented interest towards possessions

developing countries and mnes extending and enriching the research agenda foreign direct investment fdi through multinational enterprises mnes has emerged in the last decade as the principal source of foreign capital for developing countries meyer this issue underlines the need for international business ib scholars to understand the impact of these investments on host developing countries he offers a useful assessment of the literature and proposes a rich set of questions for further research however his research agenda can be extended and enriched in two ways first ib scholars must study as they always have causation in the opposite direction namely the impact of developing country context on mne behavior and the co evolution of these two variables over time in doing so they must incorporate into their models contemporary issues such as the continued inadequacy of rules for fdi in infrastructure sectors or the clever means by which mnes are rewriting the global rules under which they operate in developing countries e g on intellectual property rights second ib scholars must pay more attention to topics that are not mainstream within the field but are of great importance to developing countries examples include the behavior and performance of a new generation of home grown mnes the role of diaspora in homeland fdi in countries like china and india and the implications of global outsourcing of services

an institutional approach to cross national distance cross national distance is a key concept in the field of management previous research has conceptualized and measured cross national differences mostly in terms of dyadic cultural distance and has used the euclidean approach to measuring it in contrast our goal is to disaggregate the construct of distance by proposing a set of multidimensional measures including economic financial political administrative cultural demographic knowledge and global connectedness as well as geographic distance we ground our analysis and choice of empirical dimensions on institutional theories of national business governance and innovation systems in order to overcome the methodological limitations of the euclidean approach we calculate dyadic distances using the mahalanobis method which is scale invariant and takes into consideration the variance covariance matrix we empirically analyze four different foreign expansion choices of us companies to illustrate the importance of disaggregating the distance construct and the usefulness of our distance calculations which we make freely available to managers and scholars

cultural diversity and the performance of multinational firms we test the hypothesis that culturally related international diversification will have a positive impact on firm performance and that the opposite will be true for culturally unrelated globalization cultural diversity for fortune 500 firms was used to predict performance over a ten year period 1985 1994 controlling for several organizational and industry characteristics regression tests using nine indicators of cultural diversity revealed no significant cultural effects alternate interpretations are offered

a diffusion theory model of adoption and substitution for successive generations of high technology products this study deals with the dynamic sales behavior of successive generations of high technology products new technologies diffuse through a population of potential buyers over time therefore diffusion theory models are related to this demand growth furthermore successive generations of a technology compete with earlier ones and that behavior is the subject of models of technological substitution building upon the bass bass f m 1969 a new product growth model for consumer durables management sci 15january 215 227 diffusion model we develop a model which encompasses both diffusion and substitution we demonstrate the forecasting properties of the model by estimating parameters over part of the data and projecting shipments for later periods

liability of foreignness natural disasters and corporate philanthropy this study examines how philanthropy can mitigate liability of foreignness lof in the aftermath of a national disaster a major disaster restructures the social landscape creating an avenue for corporate contributions to play a role in recovery and relief efforts this social restructuring offers a valuable opportunity for multinational enterprises mnes to establish strong local ties in turn mne contributions at such times have a stronger impact on their local acceptance thus mnes can use these events to strengthen their position in the community and mitigate lof using the context of a national disaster in india i test these arguments with a sample of 190 mnes and 660 domestic firms i found that in the aftermath of the disaster the increase in mne contributions was much larger and less strongly tied to promotional activities than the increase in contributions from domestic firms and this difference persisted over time moreover the performance implication of post disaster philanthropy was stronger for mnes than for domestic firms these findings suggest that philanthropy plays a more strategic role for mnes in the aftermath of a disaster and it has a pronounced effect on mitigating lof