Behind Intermediary Performance in Export Trade: Transactions, Agents, and Resources

This article draws upon the first author’s dissertation, completed at the University of Washington and voted as one of the top four best dissertations at the Barry Richman Competition, Academy of Management (Cincinnati, August 1996). Funding from the Washington, Hawaii, and Ohio State CIBERs, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, and Fisher College of Business Research Committee is gratefully acknowledged. We thank H. Becker, J. Barney, J. Butler, R. Chen, T. Chi, P. Godfrey, C. Hill, C. Ingene, R. Lewicki, R. Moxon, P. Phan, R. Pfister, O. Shenkar, J. Tan, and D. Wang for helpful comments and discussions, T. Brewer and the three reviewers for detailed editorial guidance, and F. Chan, S.-H. Lee, and H. Wang for excellent research assistance. Integrating transaction cost, agency, and resource-based theories, this study extends the work of Peng and Ilinitch (1998) by undertaking the first empirical efforts to explore the determinants of export intermediary performance. We suggest that given the transaction cost constraints and principal-agent conflicts, export intermediaries’ performance depends on their possession of valuable, unique, and hard-to-imitate resources which help minimize their clients’ transaction and agency costs. Survey results from 166 firms largely support our hypotheses.