Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/307494 
Year of Publication: 
2022
Citation: 
[Journal:] Management International Review [ISSN:] 1861-8901 [Volume:] 62 [Issue:] 2 [Publisher:] Springer [Place:] Berlin, Heidelberg [Year:] 2022 [Pages:] 169-201
Publisher: 
Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Abstract: 
In an increasingly digitalizing economy, e-commerce firms are known to internationalize faster and more irregularly than offline firms. However, it is important to analyze how e-commerce firms benefit from time-based internationalization decisions and whether they are still limited by institutional distances that are said to lose relevance, which we do not believe. We propose a theory-based framework to analyze the effects of e-commerce firms' internationalization rhythm and speed on their sales growth. Importantly, we apply multilevel modeling with cross-level interactions to provide insights into the role of institutional moderators, i.e., regulative, normative, and cultural-cognitive distances. We use data from 228 e-commerce firms that are operating Europe's leading online shops and 1702 market entries over 21 years. The results show that e-commerce firms exhibit stronger growth due to their irregular and fast internationalization process. However, this relationship changes depending on certain institutional distances, and different explanations regarding country-specific variances are provided. The findings have direct implications for managers interested in how online internationalization processes affect firm growth in light of the differing degrees of cross-country contextual differences among common institutions.
Subjects: 
E-commerce firms
Online internationalization
Internationalization rhythm
Internationalization speed
Institutional distances
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by Logo
Document Type: 
Article
Document Version: 
Published Version

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