Antecedents of Information Acquisition among Exporting Firms

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Researchers (e.g., Radford 1978) have long stressed the importance of good environmental information. As noted by Keegan (1974, p.411) “how organizations obtain relevant information is crucial to the development of an empirical theory of organizations.” While some descriptive empirical studies exist on this topic in the exporting literature (e.g., Reid 1984, Pineda, Lerner, Miller, and Philips 1998), no clear determinants of scanning behavior have been found. Thus, there does not exist a clear theoretical framework that exporting managers and providers of export assistance can use to develop a strategy for environmental scanning. Given this gap in the literature, the purpose of this paper is to develop such a framework. In particular, this study attempts to offer an integrated theoretical framework for understanding exporting firms’ information acquisition behavior, particularly the antecedents which affect firms’ scanning behaviors of their exporting environment. Identifying the determinants of information search behavior among exporting companies will facilitate a better understanding of the search process, and subsequently of the processes involved in sound decision-making. Drawing upon the earlier definitions of Beatty and Smith (1987) and Bloch et al. (1986), this paper defines external information search as the degree of attention, perception, and effort directed toward obtaining environmental information for both instrumental and conceptual use Given the lack of research on information search activity in the exporting literature, studies from other research areas are employed to draw insights into this phenomenon. Specifically, within the consumer behavior literature, two well-established theoretical approaches -- psychological/motivational and economics -have been used to understand the mediating impact of environment, situational variables, and consumer characteristics on the individual’s information search process (Schmidt and Spreng 1996). The psychological/ motivational approach argues that information search is dependent on the individual’s ability and motivation, and both factors are necessary to acquire information via effortful search (Bettman and Park 1980).