THE RIPPLE EFFECTS OF TECHNOLOGY OUTFLOW RESTRICTIONS ON AN INTERNATIONAL ECOSYSTEM - EVIDENCE FROM THE U.S. SANCTIONS ON HUAWEI IN AN INTERNATIONAL STANDARD-SETTING ORGANIZATION

Recently, high-tech companies' global operations have encountered increasing institutional challenges, such as national regulations on technology outflows and export controls. Yet, there are still limited studies investigating the impacts of these challenges on high-tech firms' global strategy and competitiveness.This dissertation tries to fill the gap by investigating the ripple effects of a recent technology control measure, the U.S. Bureau of Industry Security sanctions against Huawei, on the international standard-setting process. Each of the three chapters of the dissertation takes a related but distinctive perspective to examine the effects of the sanctions. The first chapter examined the sanctions' immediate impacts, focusing on changes in the relative influence between Huawei and U.S. firms. Surprisingly, I found that the sanctions designed to "protect" U.S. technologies from misappropriation by Huawei impaired the relative influence of U.S. firms on standards. I built a game theory model to explain the surprising findings. The second chapter investigated the indirect impacts of the sanctions on those non-U.S./non-Huawei, third-party companies. By jointly considering technology interdependence and cooperative interactions between players, the paper built a framework to understand the third-party companies' technological and sociological salience when the cooperative information channels between two groups of key players were disrupted. Chapter 3 studied how political risks associated with the sanctions impacted firms' partner choices in the international ecosystem. This essay pointed out that when nations have conflicts in values, cultures, and interests, cross-border ties between companies from the two countries may be the source of political risks. In response to the geo-political risks, firms will increase cooperation with their domestic fellows, namely the "huddling effects." By huddling with each other, firms defend themselves from geo-political risks by (1) replacing risky cross-border ties with safe domestic ones; (2) forming political leverage on domestic and foreign stakeholders, and (3) justifying cross-border interactions are essential for their collective interests and therefore are in align with the national interests.