Kenneth L. Kraemer, Jennifer Gibbs, and Jason Dedrick
This paper develops and tests a model examining the relationship between firm
globalization, scope of e-commerce use and firm performance, using data from
a large-scale cross-country survey of firms from three industries. We find that
globalization leads to both greater scope of e-commerce use and improved performance,
measured as efficiency, coordination, and market impacts. Scope of e-commerce
use also leads to greater firm performance of all three types. Globalization
has differential effects on B2B and B2C e-commerce, however, such that highly
global firms are more likely to do B2B but less likely to do B2C. Our findings
provide support for Porter’s (1986) thesis that upstream business activities
(namely, B2B) are more global while downstream business activities (B2C) are
more local or multi-domestic.