Early-mover advantages at cross-border business-to-business e-commerce portals

Ziliang Deng and Zeyu Wang

Journal of Business Research, 2016, vol. 69, issue 12, 6002-6011

Abstract: The Internet enables enterprises to sell their products via cross-border business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce portals. However, researchers know little about the early-mover advantages for such third-party platforms. The rapid, convenient, and wide market access offered by these platforms may allow early-mover exporters to enjoy advantages over late movers in terms of learning effects and switching costs. We hypothesize that early-mover advantages may diminish beyond a critical length of tenure because of the free-riding costs, resolution of technological or market uncertainty, as well as the incumbent inertia of early movers. We also argue that product price and diversity will pose different boundary conditions on how early-mover advantages are manifested. Using web search and mining methods, we collect data on approximately 300,000 B2B export transactions conducted by nearly 4000 firms in 2007–2014 through online portals. Employing panel data models, we find strong evidence supporting our hypotheses.

Keywords: Business-to-business (B2B); Early-mover advantages; e-Commerce; Export; International entrepreneurship; Third-party portal (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (30)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0148296316303976
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jbrese:v:69:y:2016:i:12:p:6002-6011

DOI: 10.1016/j.jbusres.2016.05.015

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Business Research is currently edited by A. G. Woodside

More articles in Journal of Business Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().