Existing research into retailers’ foreign market exits has uncovered a number of drivers that lead multinational retailers to divest from certain countries. While scholars have investigated these drivers in isolation from one another, combinations of drivers that affect divestment decisions simultaneously remain under-researched despite scholars having indicated their importance and having called for a detailed, more holistic analysis. In this study, using a case study approach and qualitative content analysis of a wide variety of publicly available contemporary documents from different perspectives and experts, we investigate the drivers leading to all 32 country exits of the 50 largest grocery retailers in Europe in the 5-year period between 2014 and 2018. In line with previous research, the study shows the most frequent exit drivers are a low performance of the subsidiary, a low performance of the parent company, and a strategic refocus of the parent company. However, we demonstrate that for most exits, combinations of multiple interrelated drivers at the subsidiary level, the host-country level, and the parent level have a joint influence on retailers’ decisions to exit foreign markets. We also show that exits often include both failure-related drivers and strategy-related drivers. Furthermore, using the configurational approach, we identify exemplary combinations of market exit drivers that occur frequently and propose five archetypes of such combinations that suffice to explain all market exits in the dataset. For future research, we propose extending our typology through the application of a similar approach to different contexts and to use quantitative research based on the qualitative findings to generate more generalizable results.

对零售商退出国外市场的现有研究揭示了导致跨国零售商从某些国家撤资的一些驱动因素。尽管学者们对这些驱动因素进行了相互隔离的研究，但同时影响撤资决策的驱动因素组合仍未得到充分研究，尽管学者们已经表明了它们的重要性并呼吁进行详细、更全面的分析。在这项研究中，我们使用案例研究方法和从不同角度和专家对各种公开可用的当代文件进行的定性内容分析，调查了导致欧洲 50 家最大的杂货零售商在 5- 2014 年至 2018 年期间。与之前的研究一致，研究表明，最常见的退出驱动因素是子公司的低绩效、母公司的低绩效以及母公司的战略调整。然而，我们证明，对于大多数退出，子公司层面、东道国层面和母公司层面的多个相互关联的驱动因素的组合对零售商退出国外市场的决定有共同的影响。我们还表明，退出通常包括与失败相关的驱动因素和与策略相关的驱动因素。此外，使用配置方法，我们确定了频繁出现的市场退出驱动因素的示例性组合，并提出了足以解释数据集中所有市场退出的此类组合的五种原型。对于未来的研究，