Legal Distance, Cognitive Distance, and Conflict Resolution in International Business Intellectual Property Disputes

Stav Fainshmidt, George O. White and Carole Cangioni

Journal of International Management, 2014, vol. 20, issue 2, 188-200

Abstract: Due to the rising importance of intellectual property (IP) and increasing incidence of IP violations in today's global economy, this manuscript examines how legal and cognitive distances between MNEs engaged in an international IP dispute affect conflict resolution strategy choice. Even though such conflicts require some form of resolution, to date no consensus has developed with regard to what explains conflict resolution strategy choice in international IP disputes. We integrate IP, conflict management, and institutional theory literatures in testing our hypotheses on a dataset of 243 dyads consisting of 486 MNEs from 28 different countries engaged in international IP disputes. Surprisingly, we find that legal distance is positively associated with the likelihood of using negotiation (as opposed to litigation) as a conflict resolution strategy. However, cognitive distance increases reliance on litigation and at the same time weakens the effect of legal distance. This finding suggests that inherently tacit differences between home country origins may impede reaching a negotiated agreement, even though MNEs are able to bridge more formalized, codifiable, legal differences. Implications and future research directions are discussed.

Keywords: Legal distance; Cognitive distance; Intellectual property; Conflict resolution; Multinational enterprise (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1075425313000409
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:intman:v:20:y:2014:i:2:p:188-200

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/601266/bibliographic
http://www.elsevier. ... 601266/bibliographic

DOI: 10.1016/j.intman.2013.03.008

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of International Management is currently edited by M. Kotabe

More articles in Journal of International Management from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().