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INTRODUCTION
A growing number of studies investigate how the Internet and other computer-based information system (CBIS) technologies influence international strategies of firms (e.g., Ekeledo & Sivakumar, 2004; Petersen, Lawrence, & Liesch, 2002) suggesting that it facilitates internationalization, for instance through better and easy acquisition of information about foreign markets (Mathews & Healy, 2007) or through decreasing costs associated with spatial distance, for example, remote customer service or less travel costs (Arenius, Sasi, & Gabrielsson, 2006). This research tends to either focus on the speed of internationalization (Luo et al., 2005), the test of existing internationalization theories (Forsgren & Hagstrom, 2007), or examine which factors influence the propensity for foreign expansion (Kotha, Rindova, & Rothaermel, 2001). Other empirical studies are simply descriptive in nature and depict various dimensions of internationalization, such as motivations, foreign market selection, and entry modes (Loane & Bell, 2002; Loane, McNaughton, & Bell, 2004).
These studies tend to use different terms, but view electronic business companies (denoted as E-business companies) as any firm operating online that provides its products/services to customers using the Internet and other CBIS technologies. In the literature, such businesses are called "pure Internet firms" (Kotha et al., 2001), "digital information good providers" (Mahnke & Venzin, 2003), or "E-commerce corporations" (Singh & Kundu, 2002). Although these terms aim at describing a homogenous subset of companies (those using the Internet and CBIS), the samples used in these studies are quite broad and contain companies with different business models. For example, Kotha et al. (2001) include firms like eBay, Barnes & Noble (a traditional book retailer with an Internet sales channel), eToys (a classic online retailer), or Internet enablers, such as PSINet in their sample of E-businesses. Mahnke and Venzin (2003) focus on the characterization of goods provided by E-business companies and include Yahoo!, AOL, and eBay as examples of firms providing digital information goods. However, their definition also includes software companies, which produce digital information goods but are not using CBIS or the Internet as the main tool to interact with customers (examples are SAP or Oracle). Singh and Kundu (2002: 680) define "E-commerce corporations" as "organizations that from inception are engaged in electronic commerce, and derive a significant competitive advantage from the use of network resources resident in virtual...