Biases in Financial Resource Allocation to Subsidiary Projects: The Role of Psychic Distance

This paper investigates biases of senior managers in the financial resource allocation process. In particular, we analyze the role that perceived psychic distance plays in headquarters (HQ) managers’ decisions to fund entrepreneurial initiatives stemming from their subsidiaries. We used an experimental vignette approach with 109 managers from 35 countries. We find that psychic distance to a subsidiary country is negatively related to resource allocation of HQ managers only when proposals were submitted by expatriates. A potential explanation is that expatriates are perceived to lack relevant contextual knowledge for such initiatives to be valuable. This result is particularly striking because the payoff functions of our experimental design were clearly not dependent on these characteristics. We contribute to the literature on psychic distance, biases and resource allocation within multinational corporations (MNCs).