Country-of-origin effects in the entrepreneurial context An empirical evaluation of consumers’ perceptions of product quality and purchase intentions with regard to new ventures’ liabilities of newness.

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this study is to explore whether communicating the liabilities of newness can justify young ventures’ offshoring decisions to such an extent that it moderates country-of-origin (COO) effects. We adjust the established concept of COO effects to the entrepreneurial context and therefore include the country of ownership (CO) instead of the country of design (CD) next to the commonly used variables country of parts (CP) and country of assembly (CA). 396 respondents were randomly assigned to one of eight survey groups, while only some respondents were exposed to product advertisements for bicycles and solar panels that contained a communicationmanipulation. The effects of country of ownership, country of parts and country of assembly on perception of product quality and purchase intention show to be significant based on the performed regression analysis. Independent-samples T tests show that the hypothesized moderating effects of both product familiarity and the communication of liabilities of newness on the strength of the COO effects are not significant. This suggests that communicating the liabilities of newness is no adequate measure to mitigate COO effects.