This study highlights how social and commercial enterprises with local and global presence, balance their economic and social goals, to sustainably serve the bottom-of-the-pyramid (BoP) markets, predominantly in emerging economies. Employing the lens of transaction cost economics and configurational theory, we propose that successful venturing into the BoP markets, sensitize firms to create appropriate governance mechanisms for reducing transaction costs, resulting in creation and capture of values. Further, these mechanisms enable those firms to attain cost efficiency and sustainability in the process of fulfilling their social objectives. To that end, we employed the case survey method to analyse 42 cases, from the Harvard Business School repository, on multinational enterprises (MNEs) in emerging economies. Further, we used qualitative comparative analysis to uncover the various causal governance configurations that enabled those firms to sustainably serve the BoP markets.

本研究强调了具有本地和全球影响力的社会和商业企业如何平衡其经济和社会目标，以可持续地服务于金字塔底 (BoP) 市场，主要是新兴经济体。利用交易成本经济学和配置理论的视角，我们建议成功进入 BoP 市场，使公司敏感，以创建适当的治理机制来降低交易成本，从而创造和获取价值。此外，这些机制使这些公司能够在实现其社会目标的过程中实现成本效率和可持续性。为此，我们采用案例调查法分析了来自哈佛商学院知识库的 42 个案例，涉及新兴经济体的跨国企业 (MNEs)。更远，