ABSTRACT
Businesses entering early into new markets are believed to attain crucial competitive advantages over later entrants. However, this contention receives only mixed support in the empirical literature, in part because performance is measured in different ways. We reexamine the performance difference between early movers and followers entering new geographical markets based on a sample of foreign entrants in Poland, Hungary and Lithuania. We contrast market share with two other measures of firm performance that are based on the managers’ perception of their own performance relative to their own prior expectations 36and relative to industry standards. We find that market share is strongly related to order of entry, but we did not find a positive relationship between order of entry and perceived performance. We found general support for early mover advantages in Hungary and Poland but a strongly negative relationship for Lithuania, suggesting that early entry is a trade off between risk and return. doi:10.1300/J097v13n01_03 [Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-HAWORTH. E-mail address: <docdelivery@haworthpress.com> Website: <https://www.HaworthPress.com" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://www.HaworthPress.com> © 2007 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.]
