Achieving the Paradox of Concurrent Internationalization Speed: Internationalizing Rapidly in Both Breadth and Depth

Reshaping Internationalization Strategy and Control for Global E-Commerce and Digital Transactions: A Hayekian Perspective

As the sharing economy has grown rapidly and replaced the traditional businesses, new rules and norms for data and digital trade have emerged divergently in many countries. Such divergence in global e-commerce policies may be a major barrier to the internationalization of the sharing economy business. This paper aims to develop an internationalization theory that addresses how the sharing economy firms can internationalize under the condition of the divergence of global e-commerce policies. Drawing on Hayek’s knowledge economy approach, we build a new internationalization theory for the sharing economy firms that facilitate autonomously self-organized business ecosystems and adapt to the lack of harmonized rules and norms for the sharing economy. We first theorize on the attributes of the digital platform-based transactions for the internationalization of the sharing economy firms and then provide some insights into the current international debates of e-commerce policies. Our theory offers two main insights: (1) the competitive advantages of the sharing economy firms stem mainly from digital platform algorithms to catalyze digital platform-based transactions between autonomous actors; (2) the divergence of global e-commerce policies and different internet regimes in different countries may affect the internationalization of business models based on such digital platform-based transactions.

The Relationship Between Timing, Speed, and Performance in Foreign Market Network Entry

The purpose of this article is to examine the performance consequences of an early and rapid foreign network entry process. We develop a theoretical model that uses theories on first mover advantage and capability development as mechanisms to explain the relationship between the timing and speed of entering the network and SME performance in the network. The theoretical model is tested with a dataset collected on-site at 198 SMEs. The results show that earlier network entry positively affects performance and that the speed of relationship development in the network entered has a curvilinear (inverted U-shaped) effect on SMEs’ performance. Although the extant literature recognizes that firm performance is affected by the degree of insidership reached in foreign business networks, little is known about the performance effects of the timing and the speed of entering the network. Our findings suggest that managers of exporting SMEs should move first into new networks to give themselves time to grow slowly in the foreign market network to mitigate diseconomies of time compression.