EXPRESS: Timing Market Entry – the Mediation Effect of Market Potential

Timing a multinational firm’s entry into a new country is a pivotal decision with long-term impact on the firm’s overall performance, thus a deeper understanding of the drivers of the decision and their interrelationship can yield significant managerial benefits. We explore the mediating role of market potential by decomposing the total effects of the decision’s main drivers—macro-economic attractiveness, market concentration, social heterogeneity, population density—into direct and indirect effects. These decompositions explain the countervailing effects of some drivers that simultaneously make both positive and negative impacts. Our dataset encompasses mobile 4G broadband penetration in 130 countries, including market entry timings for 28 international operators in 79 countries. We establish the nature of the mediation effect of market potential on the drivers of entry timing. Using early penetration data, we utilize growth mixture modeling to divide the countries into four latent segments. We validate this segmentation using machine learning with the four key drivers as classifiers; the process establishes macro-economic attractiveness as the predominant classifier. Our analysis offers entry-timing guidance at both pre- and post-launch stages.

International Business Decision-Making in Family Small and-Medium-Sized Enterprises

Family firm internationalization has become a topic of interest over the last few decades. However, there has been surprisingly little research about the actual international business decision-making in the family firm literature. The purpose of this article is to highlight specific family firm factors which affect the international business decision-making. Based on examples on international market entry, target market choice, entry mode choice, and entry timing decisions, it is suggested that long-term and regional orientation, knowledge-base and its transfer, bifurcation-bias, and perseverance of family managers are important factors affecting international business decision-making among family SMEs.

Too Popular, Too Fast: Optimal Advertising and Entry Timing in Markets with Peer Influence

We study optimal advertising and entry timing decisions for a new product being sold in two-segment markets in which followers are positively influenced by elites, whereas elites are either unaffected or repulsed by product popularity among followers. Key decisions in such markets are not only how much to advertise in each segment over time but also when to enter the follower segment. We develop a continuous-time optimal control model to examine these issues. Analysis yields two sets of two-point boundary value problems where one set has an unknown boundary value condition that satisfies an algebraic equation. A fast solution methodology is proposed. Two main insights emerge. First, the optimal advertising strategy can be U-shaped, that is, decreasing at first to free-ride peer influence but increasing later on to thwart the repulsion influence of overpopularity causing disadoption. Second, in markets where cross-segment repulsion triggers disadoption, advertising is only moderately effective, and entry costs are high, managing both advertising and entry timing can result in significantly higher profits than managing only one of these levers. In markets without disadoption, with high advertising effectiveness or with low entry costs, in contrast, delaying entry may add little value if one already manages advertising optimally. This implies that purveyors of prestige or cool products need not deny followers access to their products in order to protect their profits, and can use advertising to speed up the democratization of consumption profitably. This paper was accepted by Juanjuan Zhang, marketing.

Market Entry in Public Procurement

This study analyzed market entry timing based on the procurement data of construction works of the eight Regional Development Bureaus of Japan’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism. After reviewing key aspects, a regression analysis was performed on the possible factors leading to entry. We found that when an efficient company enters the market, the number of bids is large and there are many tender participants, regardless of the previous bid rate and predetermined planned price trend.

Entry Timing as a Mixed Gamble in Cross-border Acquisition Waves: A study of Family Firms

We draw upon the mixed gamble perspective to investigate the entry timing decisions made by family firms in the context of cross-border acquisition (CBA) waves. We argue that family-controlled firms trade-off short-term SEW and financial losses in favor of long-term SEW and financial gains, while moving early in CBA waves. Findings suggest that family-controlled firms have a higher preference for early movement compared with nonfamily-controlled firms. Further, we show that founder’s presence on the board and acquirer’s superior performance amplifies the mixed gamble trade-offs, thereby strengthening the relationship between family control and early movement within CBA waves.

Age culture, school-entry cutoff, and the choices of birth month and school-entry timing in South Korea

This study explores how the distinctive Korean age reckoning, the Confucian age culture, and the school-entry-cutoff date affect the decisions of parents on both birth and school-entry timing for their children in Korea. There is a traditional method of age calculation in Korea that all people get one year older on January 1. Korea also has a distinctive age culture influenced by Confucianism. I find a substantial amount of birth and school-entry timing selections around the Korean age-cutoff date, January 1. The estimation results show that children born in January and February delayed school entry by 18.2–21.2 percentage points more than those born in November and December and 24% of births moved from one week before January 1 to one week after when the school-entry cutoff was March 1. After the school-entry cutoff has changed to January 1, children barely delay school enrollment, while more births are moved from December to January: 42% of births are shifted within the 7-day window. These behaviors are made by two motives: (1) parents want their children to have the same Korean age with their classmates because of the Confucian age culture; (2) they also want their children to be relatively older to have academic advantages.