ABSTRACT How do corporate political ties impact firm performance in a transition economy? This topic has attracted wide attention in the strategy field. Accordingly, our study replicates a highly influential study, ‘Managerial ties and firm performance in a transition economy: The nature of a micro-macro link’ (Peng & Luo, 2000). The original study found that managerial political ties greatly improve organizational performance, and that this ‘micro-macro’ link varies across ownership types, business sectors, firm sizes, and industry growth rates. This replication study offers a hierarchical view of political ties by extending it from the individual to the organizational level and explores the complex link between the two levels of corporate political ties and firm performance. The results of a staged quasi-replication exercise show some similarities with the original study in the mechanism of corporate political ties on firm performance but, more importantly, reveal some key differences in the effect size and contingent effects. Furthermore, an extended test shows that corporate political ties are multilevel, and different levels of political ties vary in their mechanisms and effects on firm performance. The findings reveal temporal and contextual sensitivities of political ties studies in transition economies.

We investigate the degree and duration of the effects of deceptive signaling on globalized digital platforms, vis-à-vis naturally formed organic signaling such as importer review scores and discernible inducing signaling such as banner advertisements. Sponsored listing has emerged as a powerful tool for facilitating Internet-mediated exchanges in internationalization activities. Some digital platforms based in weakly regulated countries provide sponsored listing to exporters without explicitly disclosing that sponsorship. This constitutes a deceptive signal to importers in strongly regulated countries whose governments require sponsorship disclosure. Deceptive signaling is hypothesized to stimulate an institutional hypnosis on importers, with the most immediate and largest enhancing effects on exporter performance of the three types of signaling. Organic signaling is hypothesized to exert the most durable effect. Using transaction-level data from a globalized digital platform assembled with web mining methods, we develop a novel algorithm to detect deceptive signaling. Regression results from generalized method of moments estimation support these hypotheses. Our study is among the first to investigate institutional hypnosis manifested in increasingly widespread and unchecked forms in digitized international business transacting. By discovering and reporting on a dark side of institutional arbitrage, we offer actionable implications for digital platform governance, participants, and regulators.

How does review-based online reputation (for brevity, online reputation) influence online firm survival? Drawing insights from the resource-based view and signaling theory, we examine a nonlinear (U-shaped) relationship between online reputation and firm survival on a cross-border business-to-business (B2B) platform and the resulting moderate-reputation trap. We further examine how online firms employ product strategies to moderate the effect of online reputation on firm survival and thus mitigate the moderate-reputation trap. Using data from 17,920 monthly observations (3145 sellers) from July 2016 to December 2017 on DHgate.com in China, we find strong evidence supporting our hypothesized relationships. More specifically, we demonstrate the existence of the moderate-reputation trap and that this trap can be mitigated by a high product price or low product diversity. Our research provides important insights for managers of online firms, B2B platform providers, and governments.

Crowdfunding becomes an increasingly popular online platform for entrepreneurs to request fund from a relatively large number of individuals for their innovative projects. Research on crowdfunding has long examined the factors that contribute to funding success. However, the role of funding goals in crowdfunding is still largely understudied. Drawing from signaling theory, our paper hypothesizes that funding goal, serves as a signal, has a U-shaped relationship with funding success, such that small goals signal low risk and high probability of goal attainment, thus have a high success chance; large goals signal star projects with high potential, thus also have a high success chance. We further hypothesize that such a U-shaped relationship is amplified by project popularity (backer comments and the number of comments) and campaign structure regarding updates but weakened by entrepreneurs’ human capital (education level and crowdfunding experience) and campaign structure regarding funding period and patent. Based on a dataset of 15,326 projects listed on Indiegogo from December 2015 to May 2018, our theorized relationships are supported. Our paper contributes to entrepreneurship scholarship toward a more complete understanding of factors contributing/impeding funding success in crowdfunding platforms and provides important practical implications to entrepreneurs and platform designers.

With the rapid development of Internet technologies and business models, the new Internet financial model represented by crowdfunding has become more and more popular among entrepreneurs and small and medium investors, serving as an important financing source for entrepreneurship and innovation. Accordingly, all major Internet entrepreneurial financing platforms have launched a standardized reputation evaluation system to facilitate investors to evaluate the quality of entrepreneurship program and service. Potential investors can also make investment choices based on the above-mentioned evaluation, which, together with the response to the evaluation, forms a reputation mechanism specific to Internet finance. Different from the traditional customer evaluation and evaluation feedback model, the aforesaid rating and entrepreneurs' responses are open and can transform the word of mouth into the entrepreneurs' reputation which will influence potential investors. Therefore, they have great significance and special research value. In spite of fairly complete research on evaluation of Internet financial investors, the research on entrepreneurs' response to the above-mentioned evaluation, especially that from the perspective of social network theory, is still in its infancy, lacking empirical verification and theoretical analysis. This paper, based on the data of 5893 science and technology programs collected from crowdfunding websites, specifies the empirical verification on effects and boundaries of different response behaviors and proposes corresponding management suggestions by effective combination and development of empirical research and social network theory.

How do political ties impact firm performance in the transition economy? This is a hot issue that has been widely studied in the management field. In this study, we successfully replicate a highly influential study: “managerial ties and firm performance in a transition economy: the nature of a micro-macro link” (Peng & Luo, 2000). The original study finds that managerial political ties help improve organizational performance, and this micro-macro link varies across different ownership types, business sectors, firm sizes, and industry growth rates. In this study, we first reexamine whether these relationships operate similarly in a different temporal context from the micro perspective. Then, we take a quasi-replication to test the macro-macro link between organizational political ties and firm performance. Results show that the replication is generally robust to different data, measures and methods. A further comparison analysis shows that the impact of managerial political ties on firm performance is stronger than that of organizational political ties, which extends the original study by highlighting the unique hierarchical nature of corporate political ties in the transition economy.

From the perspective of social network behavior, our paper discusses the relationship between agricultural entrepreneurial social network behavior and entrepreneurial financing performance in an Internet crowdfunding setting, and investigates the moderating role of entrepreneurial team size. In this paper, the data-mining method is used to capture and collate data regarding 7585 venture projects on an Internet crowdfunding platform between 2014 and 2017. Ordinary least squares (OLS) and Probit models are applied to the empirical test. The results show that first, compared with other industries, the effect of agricultural entrepreneurs’ quality information disclosure on entrepreneurship financing performance is lower, whereas the effect of their social network interaction is higher. Second, the entrepreneurial team size has a positive moderating role on the former and a negative moderating role on the latter. Our research is of significance for agricultural enterprises to raise their financial performance in Internet crowdfunding, especially for Chinese agricultural micro-enterprises.

The Internet enables enterprises to sell their products via cross-border business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce portals. However, researchers know little about the early-mover advantages for such third-party platforms. The rapid, convenient, and wide market access offered by these platforms may allow early-mover exporters to enjoy advantages over late movers in terms of learning effects and switching costs. We hypothesize that early-mover advantages may diminish beyond a critical length of tenure because of the free-riding costs, resolution of technological or market uncertainty, as well as the incumbent inertia of early movers. We also argue that product price and diversity will pose different boundary conditions on how early-mover advantages are manifested. Using web search and mining methods, we collect data on approximately 300,000 B2B export transactions conducted by nearly 4000 firms in 2007–2014 through online portals. Employing panel data models, we find strong evidence supporting our hypotheses.

This study is based on behavioral theories and has the purpose of determining the predictors and contingencies of strategic decision making within the strategic tripod framework and CEO age effect. Furthermore, we focus on the effect of the interaction of these aspects on strategic decisions. Multiple theories and concepts are applied in this paper, such as the institution-, industry-, and resource-based view, upper echelons theory, socio-emotional wealth, empathy, and so on. Specifically, we focus on why Chinese real estate firms decide to enter the aged housing market. By conducting an empirical study using panel data from 134 listed Chinese real estate companies, we make the following conclusions: Institutional pressure and competitor numbers positively affect, whereas slack harms, the likelihood of entry. Ceteris paribus, the resource effect is strongest when the institutional effect is the most significant. When facing institutional pressure, a firm with a CEO older than 50 is significantly more likely to enter the aged housing market than firms with a CEO that is younger.Relieving institutional pressure and avoiding cutthroat competition are helpful in making strategic decisions but not for digesting slack resources. The CEO makes strategic decisions by replying to institutional pressure but likely not from engagements in resource or competitive affairs.