The Insights From the Crowd: Drawing Inferences From Many Approaches to Key Empirical Questions in International Business

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. The authors advocate for an open science of international business in which the consequences of subjective analytic choices are rendered as transparent as possible.