ICN Graduate Business School

Purpose This article reconceptualizes psychic distance (PD) from managers' perspectives as a dynamic and adaptive sense-making process. Dynamic refers to the interactive nature of PD interpretations, while adaptive emphasizes the in-the-making quality of PD assessment as it is continually recalibrated through ongoing interactions and learning. Design/methodology/approach The article employs a multi-step methodology to develop the conceptual framework, synthesizing insights from international marketing, management, psychology, and sociology literature. Findings Managers assess PD across three cognitive domains, psychological (business self), role-based (business habitus), and cultural (organizational values and priorities), which are affected by history and religion, market environment, and social structure. PD is further influenced by mental frames, behavioral observations and mindsets, evolving adaptively through perspective taking, strategic interactions, and learning. Research limitations/implications The new conceptual framework requires empirical validation across diverse cultural and institutional contexts. Practical implications Rather than treating PD as a constraint, businesses can use it as a strategic tool to navigate international marketing decisions. Originality/value This article represents a paradigm shift in conceptualizing PD, from a static, macro-level view to a dynamic, interpretive perception rooted in managerial experience.

This study combines institutional theory with the capability perspective to investigate how the institutional characteristics of export markets served by firms from a post-transition economy affect their export performance. We analyse a dataset of 500 exporting firms from Poland, a post-transition economy, by using regression analyses. This research aims to explore how the relative institutional maturity of a firm’s export markets affects performance, as well as to establish the moderating role of managerial capabilities and export intensity for this performance effect. Relative institutional maturity is negatively associated with export performance only for exporters characterised by both low managerial capabilities and low export intensity. For firms with greater export exposure, this negative effect disappears, suggesting that accumulated international involvement may partly offset the challenges of operating in more institutionally mature markets.

We use a large language model to build a multi-dimensional index of digitization of payments, so-called the LLM-based Digitization of Payments Index (LDPI). This index allows for quantifying the changes in the use of digital payment instruments (card, contactless, mobile, and others) in France. We find that the LDPI provides lessons relative to readily available quantitative statistics on digitization of payments, collected by institutions such as the European Central Bank (ECB). Indeed, the LDPI captures the evolving complexity, sentiment, and policy expectations inherent in the digitization process, which univariate indicators miss. We contribute to identifying and assessing economic mechanisms behind the use of digital payment by examining the effects of digitization on macroeconomic indicators. Incorporating the LDPI in the set of explanatory variables of quantity theory-based model through an Error Correction framework improves the explanatory power of the model. This result means that the LDPI contains information on the relationship between payment digitization and cash demand.