Concurrent sourcing strategy of multinational firms in China: Drivers and performance implications

Concurrent sourcing is critical to multinational firms’ operations in emerging economies, such as China. Despite its prominence, research is lacking on the underlying conditions and performance implications of this strategy. We investigate the driving factors of multinational firms’ concurrent sourcing strategy and test whether concurrent sourcing outperforms other types of sourcing strategies. Our empirical findings suggest that multinational firms tend to choose concurrent sourcing under high levels of institutional regulations. Furthermore, the results show that concurrent sourcing generates better performance at high levels of uncertainties and the performance deficiency of concurrent sourcing can be mitigated when institutional regulations are high.