Fire and ice: The incompatible impact of industry-wide domestic patents and international standards on firm internationalization

Netanel Drori, Niron Hashai, Joseph A. Clougherty

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

5 Scopus citations

Abstract

This study contributes to firm internationalization theory by identifying domestic patents and international standards as industry-level attributes that differently affect the ability of firms to internationalize. Firms operating in industries with extensive patenting enhance internationalization via technology-based competitive advantages that allow overcoming liabilities of foreignness (LOFs). Furthermore, firms operating in industries with extensive standardization enhance internationalization via the reduction of LOFs that manifest in transaction costs and information asymmetries. Yet operating in industries replete with both domestic patents and international standards raises challenges for internationalizing firms due to the incompatibility of these attributes with respect to LOFs, thus domestic patents and international standards yield a negative joint effect on firm internationalization. We test these priors by employing panel data on the internationalization of up to 4248 publicly-traded U.S. firms in the manufacturing sector over the 1997–2019 period.

Original languageEnglish
Article number102158
JournalInternational Business Review
Volume32
Issue number5
DOIs
StatePublished - Oct 2023
Externally publishedYes

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 Elsevier Ltd

Funding

☆ This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors. We wish to thank seminar participants at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the SMS conference for helpful comments and suggestions. We appreciate the research assistance of Thomas DeBerge and Der-Ting Huang.

Keywords

  • Domestic patents
  • Firm internationalization
  • International standards
  • Liability of foreignness
  • Transaction cost theory

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