This study enhances our understanding of the interplay between experiential learning theories, added geographic distance, and firms' resource commitment in new foreign markets. Using panel data of 2,410 foreign market entries of Austrian firms between 1990 and 2019, we test our hypotheses to explain the mechanisms underlying firm’s foreign resource commitment. We find that greater added geographic distance lowers a firm’s willingness to commit resources abroad due to limited opportunities for exploiting and recombining prior experiences in new host environments. This negative relationship is contingent upon specific knowledge characteristics, namely the concentration and value of knowledge sourced in the most proximate host country a firm already operates in. Our results indicate that differences in knowledge characteristics influence firms’ learning process, consequently shaping their commitment behavior. This study contributes to existing literature by shedding light on the underlying foreign resource commitment – as opposed to commitment outcomes like performance – and by adding to the understanding of the link between organizational learning including knowledge recombination theories and the added distance concept.
