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The article discusses how predictions of resource-based view (RBV) that firms should increase performance are not uniform in the context of emerging market multinational enterprises (EMNE). The boundary conditions that modify RBV's general prescription to the context of EMNEs are examined, including contingency factors relating to firm, industry and country. The question of whether EMNEs should invest more than their global industry rivals in developing a relative differentiation advantage (RDA) is considered. The relationship between RDA and performance in the context of both Western and emerging economies is also addressed.

The article discusses how regional integration characteristics affect the geographic scope of multinational enterprises (MNE) and their performance in the way of operational efficiency. It analyzes how regional integration agreements (RTA) influences firm-level strategy. The different types of RTA are explored, including free trade areas (FTA), customs unions (CU), common markets (CM) and economic unions (ECU). It also determines whether regional integration propels MNE to adopt a high or low home regional focus and its impact on the operational efficiency of MNE.

Crafting international strategy for firms from transition countries poses a strategic dilemma. While moving upmarket to advanced countries can enhance exploratory learning, the competitive nature of advanced countries' markets can also challenge profitability. Lateral/down-market moves can provide safe havens to exploit existing advantages but do not present significant exploration opportunities. How should new multinationals deal with this dilemma between pursuing the glamour of upmarket moves and the realistic success probabilities of the down-market moves? We advance an exploration-exploitation framework of FDI portfolio optimization, linking the strength of a firm's intangible resources to its market portfolio position. We test our framework on 394 Polish FDIs with a simultaneous equations methodology, accompanied by a post-hoc qualitative analysis of four internationalization trajectories to build our recommendations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have debated whether entrepreneurs socialized under communism exhibit a risk-taking propensity after that experience. Some note that communism discouraged standing out and thus risk-taking, while others counter that communism encouraged risk-taking to survive. We reconcile this debate in two ways: first, by dividing communism into hard-line and reformist types, and second by focusing only on high-impact entrepreneurs, avoiding confounding them with routine entrepreneurs. Contrary to the assumption that high-impact entrepreneurs embrace risk, we found that such Russian entrepreneurs seek or avoid risk depending on whether they were socialized only under reformist communism, or under both reformist and hard-line communism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research has debated if exposure to communism reduces an individual's risk-taking propensity. Some have argued that communism suppresses individuals' risk-taking to keep a low profile. Others have countered that communism inspired individuals to embrace risk to survive. We bridge these inconsistent findings by accounting for two under-explored heterogeneities: direction of communist policies (forward reformist vs. backward hard-line) at the start of childhood and persistence of communist imprint till end of adolescence (reaching adolescence before vs. after communism's fall). We integrate communist imprinting and identity theories, as each provides a partial understanding of entrepreneurs' risk-taking propensity. While the communist imprinting theory has focused on which broad institutional context (communism vs. capitalism) is imprinted on individuals, it has paid less attention to when individuals are imprinted with the context and what specific variety of communism they are imprinted with. Conversely, identity theory has overly-focused on identity formation in childhood or identity changes in adulthood, paying less attention to identity development during the individual's formative years prior to adulthood. We integrate and test these two theories in the context of Russian entrepreneurs, obtaining four risk-taking categories that provide a more nuanced understanding of an entrepreneur's risk-taking propensity than either theory on its own. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We draw from insights in the neo-institutional and evolutionary economics literatures to develop a Theory of Speed of Socialist Imprinting Decay that extends existing theory in three new directions. First, extant theory has exclusively focused on the beginning and reinforcement of socialist imprinting at the time of a firm's founding during socialism (traditionalizing forces). Instead, we focus on the understudied end and decay of socialist imprinting after the start of pro-market reforms. Second, we study the speed with which a firm's socialist imprinting decays after the start of the country's reforms. Third, we suggest that countries' speed of reforms acts as obsoleting forces and firms' duration of socialist legacy acts as traditionalizing forces that jointly affect firms' speed of socialist imprinting decay, yielding four types of transitioning firms: Market Sprinters, Market Preemptors, Market Saunterers, and Socialist Anchors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyze how the frequent use of dark favors, more specifically informal payments meant to function as bribes, affects institution- based transaction costs (degree of business obstacles) for privately held entrepreneurial firms in transition economies. Prior research on this subject matter has focused almost exclusively on how widespread the practice of dark favors is in various contexts, and on the determinants of dark favors' levels. In contrast, we focus on a critical complementary issue, namely the frequency of dark favors, i.e., the regularity with which firms engage in bribing, and the performance outcomes thereof. We develop a transaction-cost-economics (TCE) based logic, augmented with insights from signaling theory, to predict the effects of frequency on dark favors' outcomes, and assess the moderating impact of two governance-related parameters, namely the status of the company as a family firm, and the presence of business network governance. We test our hypotheses on a sample of 206 companies in 17 transition economies with data covering the 2002 and 2005 periods. We find support for our prediction that a higher dark favors' frequency will negatively affect family firms because of comparatively stronger reputation impacts, as well as firms operating in business networks because of comparatively stronger information leakage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyze the understudied impact of synchronization of reforms rhythms on the performance of transition economy firms. We argue that higher synchronization of reforms rhythms improves the firms' performance due to timing synergies among the different reforms types. Additionally, we propose that excess high-discretion slack further strengthens the performance benefits from a higher synchronization of reforms rhythms because it allows the transition economy firms to more quickly adapt to their changing institutional environment. Thus, we extend the institution-based view of the firm by shifting its traditional focus on institutional differences across countries to a new research direction that accounts explicitly for the timing of implementation--concurrent or sequential--of the different types of reforms rhythms within a country over time. Our test on a sample of 430 firms from 13 transition economies during 1991-2009 supports our arguments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]