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This paper aims to examine the myriad linkages between cross‐border migration and international business activity through a conceptual framework of international arbitrage.

While labour is internationally the least integrated of the various markets (capital, product, labour) the increasing co‐movement of both tasks and workers has created opportunities for the arbitrage and exploitation of differences between national labour markets. Because national labour markets typically display the two characteristics of separation and price discrepancy it is possible to utilise the principle of arbitrage and within this framework examine cost, intellectual, knowledge and employment arbitrage.

The discussion suggests that international business offers valuable insights into migration processes and effects which have been dominated by the research approaches of other disciplines. It is found that migrants can help reduce transaction costs for bilateral trade, contribute to nostalgic trade, encourage outsourcing and foreign direct investment through referrals and performance signalling, assist country of origin development through remittances and return migration and provide valuable knowledge to their employers in the country of residence.

The paper is a conceptual one which offers no new empirical results but does provide a context for the interpretation of the more specialised studies that appear in this special issue. There is a need for research on this topic to be firmly grounded in the contemporary context of an increasingly integrated global economy. It also suggests a number of specific areas where further work would be useful.

The key contribution of the paper is in developing a comprehensive conceptual framework – that of labour market arbitrage – which enables a clearer understanding of the complex impacts of international migration on international business activity. It also distinguishes between direct and indirect effects.

As consumers read multiple reviews, so consumer review consistency is important. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of consumer review consistency in influencing attitudes toward brands by examining its underlying effect on consumers’ emotions after they read consistent consumer reviews. In addition, the moderation effect of hedonic and utilitarian purchase values on positive consumer emotions and attitudes toward brands is explored.

This study used a quantitative design in which 329 participants – undergraduate and MBA students at a university in Taiwan – were asked to complete online questionnaires. To generalize the results, the questions in the questionnaire were based on any consumer reviews that the participants had recently browsed.

Consumer review consistency positively influences attitudes toward brands. Positive emotions are also developed when reading consistent consumer reviews, and this positively influences consumers’ attitudes toward brands. However, positive emotions are not derived from consistent consumer reviews in all contexts. The results show that positive emotions work well when consumers shop using hedonic value. Positive emotions create positive consumers’ attitudes toward a brand when they shop using hedonic value, but this significant effect does not occur when consumers shop using utilitarian value.

This study’s results suggest that only investigating the quality of a consumer review or other aspects of a single review might overlook the impact of consumer review consistency, as consumers read multiple reviews. Consumer review consistency plays an important role in brand effectiveness, as consumers form positive attitudes toward brands when they read consistent reviews. Positive emotions can strengthen consumers’ attitudes toward a brand. Moreover, positive emotions increase positive attitudes toward brands only when consumers shop using hedonic value. However, positive emotions do not enhance consumers’ attitudes if they shop using utilitarian value.

Rather than focusing on the quality of a single review, online shops should carefully consider consumer review consistency. Although positive reviews are better than negative reviews, it is quite difficult for every shop to maintain 100 percent positive reviews. Therefore, maintaining and offering quality products and services are rather important to acquiring more positive reviews. Online shops should consider experimental marketing strategies when managing online shops. The layout of online sites that show consistent consumer reviews can provide consumers with cues that shorten decision making, especially for products that consumers tend to shop for using hedonic value.

This research extends the previous consumer review literature. Previous research was focused mainly on the quality of consumer reviews or other aspects of a single review. This research shows that focusing a single consumer review is not sufficient, as consumers generally read more than one consumer review. In addition, the role of positive emotions as a mediator between consumer review consistency and attitudes toward a brand was investigated. Furthermore, the moderated mediation effect was applied to investigate the role of shopping value (hedonic vs utilitarian value) as a moderator of positive emotions’ mediation effect.

In modern e-commerce and omnichannel management, consumers can utilize visual information delivered by augmented reality interactive technology (ARIT) to relate to products and view them worn on themselves. Accordingly, ARIT is increasingly common in online retail environments because this dynamicproduct imagery decreases the gap between online and offline shopping. On the basis of construal-level theory (CLT), this study not only examines the system characteristics that impact the perceived ease of use and usefulness of ARIT but also explores how these system characteristics can successfully affect online consumers to adopt ARIT in retail settings.

In this study, ARIT is applied mainly in an online clothes fitting context. By conducting a task-based laboratory study, 344 valid samples were collected. Structure equation modeling (SEM) was employed for further analysis.

Navigation structure, graphic style and information content were identified as the three system characteristics that affect perceived ease of use and usefulness of ARIT. Of the three characteristics, information content has the greatest impact on perceived ease of use and usefulness of ARIT. The study also found that navigation structure, graphic style and information content all shape ARIT system characteristics, and this explains and predicts the perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use effect better than any original single system characteristic.

Interactive marketing research indicates that the influence of immediately visualizing consumer–product matching effects creates excitement, arouses emotions and triggers curiosity to explore additional product purchase experiences. This study contributes to the present body of knowledge of the concept of ARIT systems. This is a pioneer research that uses CLT to act as a crucial psychological mechanism that dominates online fitting and apparel appraisal for consumers using ARIT. This study serves as a reference for designing and employing multisensory ARIT applications in interactive marketing to drive online sales.

The purpose of this paper is to integrate the resource-based view (RBV) with organisational learning theory by investigating the role of the RBV mechanism in the preceding performance-current performance linkage. The authors further examine the role of the decision-making approach on the RBV-prior-current performance paradigm. Using China as the research setting, they empirically test the theoretical model based on 229 firms selected from a nation-wide survey.

This study has used China as the research setting. The authors empirically test the theoretical model based on 229 firms selected from a nation-wide survey.

This study reveals that prior export performance is a key determinant of current export performance, and this effect is enhanced by product certification (an internal RBV mechanism) and the intention to make an initial public offering (and external RBV mechanism). Moreover, the internal RBV-prior-current performance paradigm is positively moderated by the delegated decision-making approach, while the external RBV-prior-current performance paradigm is negatively moderated by this decision-making approach.

The results related to RBV and prior organisational learning also extends the extant literature and offer implications in two important ways. One, this research advances existing research that has only considered the direct effect of organisational learning on current performance (Lages et al., 2008). In addition to its direct effect, this study suggests that the interplay of organisational learning and resource commitment also provides important determinants of export performance. These new results imply that future research should not only explore the effect of organisational learning theory but also that of firm resource in the research on the prior-current performance dyad (Lages et al., 2008). Two, this study also advances the theoretical development of the export venture resource and management commitment research by revealing two new factors (Cavusgil and Zou, 1994). As a result, when conducting exporting activity from an emerging economy, exporting firms should consider committing their resources on acquiring international certification and seeking external funding. These new findings provide new guidance on the choice of the type of resource commitments and their roles in the prior-current performance conceptualisation when operating in the emerging markets.

The results also contribute to the conceptualisation of the decision-making literature in the context of emerging economies (Garnier, 1982; Kao, 1993; Redding, 1993; Solberg, 2000), where an owner decision-making approach is associated with a number of negative effects (Kao, 1993; Redding, 1993). This study suggests that an owner decision-making approach can actually help firms to implement the effect of external RBV’s influence in the prior-current performance framework. As a result, the findings imply that researchers and managers of EMEFs should now consider including the effect of decision-making governance when exploring the interactive effect of RBV and organisational learning in export performance research (Lages et al., 2008).

This three-way interaction results have implications for the development of organisational learning theory, the RBV, decision-making, export performance and emerging market literature.

Although the relation between standardization/adaptation strategy and performance has been extensively examined in the international marketing literature, the findings concerning these factors are still inconclusive. The conflicting results might relate to the analysis approach adopted in prior research, which tends to focus on the direct effect of marketing strategies. By utilizing the contingency theory, the purpose of this paper is to uncover the moderation factors for the strategy‐structure‐performance paradigm in the export sector. Internal, external and product‐related factors are explored.

This study focuses on four strategy and structure combinations: The global approach (standardization‐centralization); the glocal approach (standardization‐decentralization); the regcal approach (adaptation‐centralization); and the local approach (adaptation‐decentralization). The interactive effect of the four approaches and a set of contingent factors are examined based on the experience of 151 exporting firms operating in the EU region. The respondent firms operate in various manufacturing and service industries.

It is revealed that firm size, international business experience, consumer characteristics, the legal environment, cultural distance and the nature of the products play a moderating role between a firm's adoption of a particular approach and its performance, as measured by market share and sales growth, dependent on the relevant marketing program elements (i.e. product, price, promotion and place).

The research findings presented in the paper have significant implications for future research and strategic application.

This exploratory study aims to examine the influence of immigrant employee effects within a sample of small New Zealand‐based international service providers.

Seven immigrant employees from six firms were interviewed. The interviews examined immigrant effects on four areas: knowledge transfer and application; customer relationships; marketing strategy and market entry mode. Propositions derived from the literature were tentatively tested.

The findings, consistent with other literature on immigrant effects, indicated that immigrant employees play an important role in shaping these areas within small international service firms. Of particular importance was knowledge of local culture and market conditions. Immigrant employees enjoyed considerable discretion in the creation and management of customer relationships.

There appeared to be strong interactions between the value of immigrant knowledge, relationships and the characteristics of service offerings. The results established have provided guidance for researchers when formulating their research frameworks concerning market entry mode, international marketing strategy, knowledge transfer, immigrant employees and so on. Managers should also consider employing the outcomes of this research when designing their international human resource management and marketing strategies. However, these exploratory findings should be confirmed by future research which is formulated with a larger sample size. Only then can the contributions of this study be considered more definite.

This study is designed to explore international marketing standardisation (IMS) by investigating the choice of IMS for industrial product (ID) and non‐industrial product (non‐ID) operators and firms from Australia and New Zealand.

This study has used the experiences of a group of exporting firms to achieve its research objectives. It has employed both main effect and interaction methods to assess its research framework.

The outcomes of this study reveal that, in addition to the main effect outcomes, some significant variations exist. Some of these variations are consistent with the main effects, while others are not. On some occasions a factor is not identified as a main effect factor, and yet it has a significant impact in a certain situation (e.g. infrastructure*IDs). The interaction outcomes are more significant in terms of the price, promotion and performance components. The interaction outcomes show that firms might be able to use a number of alternatives to achieve their performance goals when operating in a foreign host market, even in the absence of a main effect. These alternatives have not been outlined in the existing literature.

The results point out that researchers may need to be cautious about generalising their findings without conducting a thorough statistical examination on the sub‐group variations within a study.

Previous research on IMS strategies focuses on investigating factors’ direct impacts on the research framework. Sub‐group variations have not been explored in the existing studies.

This paper seeks to explore the migration dynamics that have characterized Chinese immigration in Budapest and the migrants' understanding of their own position in relation to the Chinese diaspora. The paper also aims to discuss the interaction of the local economy and resources of the Chinese migrants to form viable network communities.

The ideas of market embeddedness and the critical role of market opportunities are critically evaluated in the context of local practices. The paper seeks to show that the “new” entrepreneur is an active and creative social actor able to utilize, mobilize and control resources in different countries to achieve business opportunities and growth for him/herself.

It is shown that globalization has spawned “new” transnational spaces and enabled migrant Chinese entrepreneurs to thrive and grow their businesses. This is a new trend and clearly suggests that a qualitatively different migration trajectory is evolving; and theoretically, analysts of globalization and entrepreneurial development have to better account for the different trajectories of entrepreneurial forms.

The paper suggests that this “new” migrant entrepreneurship trend is qualitatively different and marks a “new” development and it is a consequence of economic globalization and the transnationalization of business and economic activities.

Previous studies on the contribution of immigrant employees (IE) have mainly focused on immigrants from non‐Western industrialised countries. Few studies have explored the contribution of immigrants from the European Union (EU). The purpose of this commentary is to present the outcomes of a recent study on immigrant employees from the EU region.

This paper examines the experience of 77 New Zealand firms operating in 11 EU markets. Only 10 percent of the firms investigated hired IE to assist or manage their firms' marketing activities in the EU region, suggesting employment of IE is still in its infancy stage. The EU is the largest immigrant source region, which contributes more than 30 percent of total immigrants to New Zealand in 2005. This study uncovers the profile of firms which have, or have not, utilised such a strategy.

It was found that, at present, the users of IE are larger in size, equipped with higher international business experience, FDI mode users and operate more in the consumer durable and industrial product sectors. Among marketing environmental factors examined, competitive environment accounted for the most variation. The extent of standardisation difference of price and place was the highest.

The findings of this study imply that the choice of IE from the EU region might relate to a firm's size, international business experience, market entry mode selection, product type and host market environment and characteristics (e.g. market size). IE might also have contributed to a firm's choice of pricing and place standardisation strategy. However, these relationships need to be verified by future research.