Experience and FDI Risk-taking: A Microfoundational Reconceptualization

Studies of how firms respond to host country risk have assigned explanatory primacy to organizational capability and managerial risk preference. The organization-level account is built on the premise that capability is a prerequisite for risk-taking while the individual-level account focuses on the managers’ intrinsic behavioral attitude. Without integrating one with the other, the former is open to many alternative explanations while the latter remains only a source of heterogeneity. We propose that employing the microfoundations approach can address the limitations of each account and yield a fuller understanding of FDI risk-taking. Drawing upon behavioral decision theory and the concept of risk propensity, we describe the lower-level mechanisms that generate the empirical regularity between firm experience and risk-taking, which has been attributed to the macro-level capabilities paradigm. We finalize the framework with an account as to how individual-level mechanisms can be incorporated into the context of organizational strategic decision-making.