Microfoundation of behavioural issues in International Business

This project examines the role of key individuals (CEOs and Top Management Teams) in facilitating international business. The mainstream debate on cross-border investments has left ample room for exploratory research that puts key individuals, their characteristics and their behavior at the core of the analysis, and provide a micro-foundation of the internationalization strategies. The research aims to originally and significantly advance our understanding of how individuals’ cultural and demographic characteristics, educational background, working experiences, and cognitive biases and heuristics, as well as how the composition and diversity of top management teams’ skills, cultures and demographic characteristics, affect strategic choices such as going international, entry mode, acquisition diversification and location choice. A further topic under investigation is the relationship between the networks of individuals and internationalization, with a focus on the impact of interlocks among boards directorates on location choices. Understanding the micro-foundations of international business will increase scholars’ and practitioners’ awareness of how cross-border investments work, thus providing them with a set of tools for opening the black box of firms in cross-border acquisitions. The analyses are carried out both at theoretical level, especially as regards the behavioral approach, and at empirical level, by relying on different databases, such a set of UK firms investing abroad, a sample of Italian innovative start-ups and a sample of European firms