Informal institutions influence all aspects of international business (IB), but they have received limited attention in the literature relative to formal institutions. This article extends prior IB work by examining the relationships between several key formal and informal institutional factors and the international strategy of MNEs. First, it examines the direct effects of formal and informal institutional effectiveness, convergence, and distance on MNE local adaptation, developing arguments and propositions for each relationship. Second, it focuses on the interactions of formal and informal institutional effectiveness and convergence to develop an eight-fold typology of market institutional configurations. This typology depicts the role that informal institutions take in a market depending on the interaction of these three institutional factors. Third, it builds on these interactions and the concept of institutional distance to develop a conceptual framework of market and MNE institutional diversity and dynamism. This framework captures the formal and informal institutional relationships within a home market, host market, parent firm, and foreign subsidiary, as well as the formal and informal institutional relationships across each of these entities over time. In so doing, this article helps advance research on informal institutions and IB, which can lead to considerable future work on the topic.

非正式制度影响国际商务 (IB) 的各个方面，但相对于正式制度，它们在文献中受到的关注有限。本文通过研究几个关键的正式和非正式制度因素与跨国公司的国际战略之间的关系，扩展了之前的 IB 工作。首先，它考察了正式和非正式制度有效性、趋同和距离对跨国公司当地适应的直接影响，为每种关系发展论据和命题。其次，它侧重于正式和非正式制度有效性和趋同的相互作用，以发展出八种市场制度配置类型。这种类型学描述了非正式制度在市场中所扮演的角色，这取决于这三个制度因素的相互作用。第三，它建立在这些相互作用和制度距离概念的基础上，发展了一个市场和跨国公司制度多样性和活力的概念框架。该框架涵盖了正式和非正式的制度关系在国内市场、东道国市场、母公司和外国子公司内，以及随着时间的推移这些实体之间的正式和非正式机构关系。通过这样做，本文有助于推进对非正式机构和 IB 的研究，这可能会导致关于该主题的大量未来工作。