Whereas conventional wisdom holds that multinational enterprises (MNEs) invest less in host countries that pose greater policy risk—the risk that a government will opportunistically alter policies to expropriate an investing firm's profits or assets—we argue that MNEs vary in their response to host‐country policy risk as a result of differences in organizational capabilities for assessing such risk and managing the policy‐making process. We hypothesize that firms from home countries characterized by weaker institutional constraints on policy makers or greater redistributive pressures associated with political rent seeking will be less sensitive to host‐country policy risk in their international expansion strategies. Moreover, firms from home countries characterized by sufficiently weak institutional constraints or sufficiently strong redistributive pressures will seek out riskier host countries for their international investments to leverage their political capabilities, which permit them to attain and defend attractive positions or industry structures. We find support for our hypotheses in a statistical analysis of the foreign direct investment location choices of MNEs in the electric power generation industry during the period 1990–1999, the industry's first decade of internationalization. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Research summary:We use a novel theoretical framework to synthesize ostensibly disparate streams of nonmarket strategy research. We argue that faced with weak institutions, firms can create and appropriate value by either adapting to, augmenting, or transforming the existing institutional environment, and can do so either independently or in collaboration with others. We use the resulting typology of six distinct nonmarket strategies to provide an integrative review of nonmarket strategy research. We then extend this framework to examine the choice between nonmarket strategies, arguing that this choice depends upon whether the existing institutional environment is incomplete or captured, and discussing other drivers of nonmarket strategy choice, the relationship between these strategies, and their social impact, so as to provide an agenda for future research.Managerial summary: The pursuit of competitive advantage often requires firms to operate in contexts where existing rules and regulations provide inadequate protection. Disruptive technologies open up new opportunities for value creation, but it takes years before appropriate regulations are introduced. Economic reforms open up new markets, but these are often regulated to favor incumbents and politically connected insiders. In such environments, managers must decide whether to adapt their strategies to the existing institutional environment, devote resources to improve it, or try to transform it altogether. In this article, we develop an integrative theoretical framework that connects and synthesizes research examining each of these options, and offers some preliminary thoughts on how managers may choose among these different approaches. Copyright

Why do countries differ so much in the extent to which they adopt neo-liberal, marketoriented reform in their infrastructure industries? Building on world-society and neo-institutional theories in sociology, we argue that international pressures of coercion, normative emulation, and competitive mimicry strongly influence the domestic adoption of market-oriented reform.We consider the effect of such pressures on the adoption of four reform elements: the privatization of state-owned firms, the formal separation of the regulatory authority from the executive branch, the de facto elimination of executive political influence on the regulatory authority, and the opening of the retail market to multiple service providers. We find generally robust support for our arguments using a multivariate probit analysis of reform adoption in the telecommunications and electricity industries of as many as 71 countries and territories between 1977 and 1999. Our results also suggest that the coercive effect of lending by the IMF and World Bank differs for each reform element. We discuss the possibility that, by leading countries to adopt some reform elements but not others, international coercion may not produce ideal outcomes.

In a recent issue of this journal, Glenn Hoetker proposes that researchers improve the interpretation and presentation of logit and probit results by reporting the marginal effects of key independent variables at theoretically interesting or empirically relevant values of the other independent variables in the model, and also by presenting results graphically (Hoetker, 2007: 335, 337). In this research note, I suggest an alternative approach for achieving this objective: reporting differences in predicted probabilities associated with discrete changes in key independent variable values. This intuitive approach to interpretation is especially useful when the theoretically interesting or empirically relevant changes in independent variables values are not very small, and also for models that contain interaction terms (or higher-order terms such as quadratics). Although the graphical presentations recommended by Hoetker implicitly embody this approach, they typically fail to include appropriate measures of statistical significance, and may therefore lead to erroneous conclusions. In order to calculate such measures, I recommend and demonstrate an intuitive simulation-based approach to statistical interpretation, developed by King et al. (2000), that has gained widespread adherence in the field of political science. Throughout the article, I provide a running example based on research that has previously appeared in the Strategic Management Journal.

We offer a simple model of policymaking emphasizing socialization and limits on human cognition to explicate mechanisms of change in emergent (as opposed to established) institutions. Emergent institutions are more susceptible to change, and their opponents may use frames or existing reference points to illustrate inconsistency with prevailing notions of legitimacy. Broader institutional structures and specific organizational characteristics moderate pressure for change. This perspective has novel implications for strategy and policy design.