Andrew Delios, Tianyou Hu, Shu Yu, Nan Zhou, Faisal M. Ahsan, Mona Bahl, Tao Bai, Madhurima Basu, Hanoku Bathula, Georgios Batsakis, Jorge Carneiro, Dwarka Chakravarty, Danyang Chen, Weihong Chen, Ying-Yu Chen, Luis Alfonso Dau, Shu Deng, Desislava Dikova, Xiaomin Fan, Viswa Prasad Gada, Dongdong Huang, Hyun Gon Kim, Kyungjoong Kim, Aleš Kubíček, Chengguang Li, Wen Helena Li, Yi Li, Yuanyuan Li, Yung-Chih Lien, Huanchen Liu, Wei Liu, Grigorij Ljubownikow, Racheal Louis Vincent, Ondřej Machek, Parul Manocha, Yoichi Matsumoto, Atthaphon Mumi, Chao Niu, N. Nuruzzaman, Vidya Sukumara Panicker, K. Praveen Parboteeah, Wei Qiao, Xiaole Qiao, Shyamala Sethuram, Ao Shen, Lei Shi, Evis Sinani, Sandeep Sivakumar, Pei-Shan Soon, Maximilian Stallkamp, Priit Tinits, Daniel Tolstoy, Andranik Tumasjan, Mayank Varshney, Andres Velez-Calle, Chris Wagner, Peng Wang, Xingang Wang, Yong Wang, Liang Wen, Tao Wu, Sandeep Yadav, Jiaju Yan, Jing Yu Yang, Megan Zhang, Weihao Zhang, Yameng Zhang, Yang Zhao, Eric Uhlmann
In this crowdsourced initiative, 57 independent analysts used the same longitudinal dataset to address four major empirical questions in international business. For all four research questions, different analysts obtained substantial estimates in opposite directions, meaning that they could have drawn any conclusion at all had they conducted the project alone. Aggregating across the results obtained by different analysts pointed to an overall answer for two of the four research questions, although for one of the two questions, the evidence was more suggestive than conclusive. That said, the variability in results was not simply random, and could in some cases be meaningfully explained. Choices regarding how to operationalize variables played an important role in determining the empirical results, and expert analysts were more likely to report large positive effects. Rather than exhibiting a bias to confirm their pre-existing beliefs, analysts appeared to rationally update their beliefs considering the evidence. Overall, these findings empirically demonstrate the role of subjective researcher choices in shaping results in international business research yet also show that it is still possible to draw meaningful conclusions in science. We advocate for an open science of international business in which the consequences of subjective analytic choices are rendered as transparent as possible. © The Author(s) 2025.
National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore; Faculty of Business Administration, University of Macau, E22, Avenida da Universidade, Taipa, Macao; Monash University & Suzhou Industrial Park Monash Research Institute of Science and Technology, Suzhou, China; School of Economics and Management & Advanced Institute of Business, Tongji University, 1500 Siping Road, Shanghai, 200092, China; Xavier School of Management, Jamshedpur, India; Illinois State University, Normal, United States; The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia; Symbiosis Institute of International Business & Symbiosis International (Deemed University), Pune, India; The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand; The American College of Greece & Brunel University of London, Uxbridge, United Kingdom; FGV EAESP Sao Paulo, School of Business Administration, São Paulo, Brazil; San Diego State University, San Diego, United States; Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Shanghai, China; Guangxi University, Nanning, China; National Dong Hwa University, Taiwan; Northeastern University, Boston, United States; The University of Mississippi, Oxford, United States; Vienna University of Economics and Business, Vienna, Austria; Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing, China; Glasgow Caledonian University, Glasgow, United Kingdom; Nankai University, Tianjin, China; The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick, United States; Northwest Missouri State University, Maryville, United States; Prague University of Economics and Business, Prague, Czech Republic; Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany; University of Technology Sydney, Ultimo, Australia; The University of Sydney, Camperdown, Australia; California State University, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, United States; National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan; Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, China; Qingdao University, Qingdao, China; Monash University Malaysia, Subang Jaya, Malaysia; University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, United States; Keio University, Minato, Japan; Mahasarakham University and National Institute of Development Administration, Kham Riang, Thailand; City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong; University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom; Loughborough Business School, Loughborough, United Kingdom; University of Wisconsin – Whitewater, Whitewater, United States; Xiamen University, Xiamen, China; Chang’an University, Xi’an, China; Baruch College, NY, United States; Xidian University, Xi’an, China; University of International Business and Economics, Beijing, China; Copenhagen Business School, Frederiksberg, Denmark; Indian Institute of Management Raipur, Raipur, India; Sunway University, Subang Jaya, Malaysia; East Carolina University, Greenville, United States; Permanent Representation of Estonia to the OECD, Paris, France; Stockholm School of Economics, Stockholm, Sweden; Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Mainz, Germany; Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, Ahmedabad, India; Universidad EAFIT, Medellín, Colombia; ananki.ai GmbH, Menlo Park, United States; Beijing Normal-Hong Kong Baptist University, Zhuhai, China; Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu, China; Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Suzhou, China; The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, China; Indian Institute of Management Bangalore, Bengaluru, India; Baylor University, TX, United States; The University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia; NY, United States; Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Suzhou, China; Northwest Normal University, Lanzhou, China; INSEAD, Singapore, Singapore
