Foreignness Liability of Mobile App Startups: Examining Performance in the Context of Consumer and Investor Cultural Distances
研究了文化距离对移动应用初创企业在海外市场绩效的影响，发现投资者与消费者文化距离的调节作用，并揭示了不同环境稳定性下的最优文化距离配置。
Mobile platforms provide important entrepreneurial opportunities by facilitating access to a global market composed of more than a hundred countries. These opportunities are crucial for mobile app startups as they seek to reach a wider audience and accelerate growth. Nevertheless, performing in foreign countries is challenging as mobile app startups face a “foreignness liability” since they are competing against complementors (i.e., app developers) who have experience in their domestic market. We offer a research model that assesses the impact of cultural distance on the app-level performance of mobile app startups in foreign countries. We hypothesize the moderating effects of investor-consumer cultural distance and environmental characteristics within foreign countries. We test the model using a dataset of over 550 mobile app startups operating on the iOS platform. Our findings support our hypotheses and provide insights into whether mobile platforms are level playing fields. Our study sheds light on the interactions between a startup and its investors’ cultural distances highlighting configurations of cultural distance that are beneficial for app performance in foreign countries when the environment is stable or uncertain.