Managerial implications and research outlook

Abstract

I set out to find out the effects of cultural affinity and career perspective on decision-making in international joint ventures. Potential biases in the joint venture managers’ and the investors’ decisions were investigated. For the purpose of the study, I implemented a combination of empirical methods, namely expert interviews, experiments, and group discussions. Over 900 experimental subjects and interviewees of different nationalities are involved, including Chinese, German, American, and South Korean. In understanding and interpreting the study results, one needs to caution against generalization to all people with these nationalities, since individual differences inevitably exist among people from the same national background. Still, the study provides insights into implicit incentives for managers of international joint ventures that have not been investigated in detail by previous research in the literature so far.