In this three-essay dissertation, I seek to advance the aspiration level learning theory in a variety of organizational decisions in which international business audiences may be interested. In essay 1, I argue that multinational enterprises’ (MNEs) aspirations for parent performance may be important for both learning from self-performance and learning from competitors’ performance, which in turn influence the likelihood of internalizing and quitting their international joint ventures. The extension of the aspiration level learning theory to inter-organizational learning can be considered a novel theoretical attempt and I find some support in a sample of Japanese MNEs. In the remaining two essays, I focus on organizational learning from multiple goals’ performance and propose a mechanism of attending to causally related goals that is different from the well-established sequential-attention rule in the literature. I examine the proposed mechanism in MNEs’ decisions on divesting foreign subsidiaries in essay 2 and in national governments’ decisions on innovation policies in essay 3. I find strong support for the proposed attention mechanism in a sample of Japanese MNEs and a sample of Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries respectively. Overall, this dissertation makes a number of novel theoretical contributions to the literature on organizational learning. It also broadens our knowledge about when and why MNEs change the ownership position of their foreign subsidiaries and national governments change their innovation policies.
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