Alternative Finance in the International Business Context, A Review and Future Research

International business (IB) studies provide unique insights into understanding firms doing business in multiple locations and environments compared to focusing on particular ones. This article reviews and analyzes theories, practices, and future research on alternative finance in the IB context. Alternative finance operates within the social, business, and virtual networks, generating comparative advantages over finance relying on formal financial institutions. We discover that although there is a voluminous finance literature theorizing and documenting practices of alternative finance and their economic, finance, and governance roles, only a tiny portion taps into IB’s comparative dimension, acknowledging that financial systems and corporate governance regimes differ across countries and questioning the existence of a universal best model. Moreover, alternative finance in IB’s cross-border dimension has been completely ignored. We give detailed accounts of what is known and not-known about alternative finance and propose future research that addresses its value and impacts in the IB context concerning space heterogeneity and multi-national agents’ operations, strategy, and outcomes, as well as technological evolution and increasing complexity in global integration. We also call for new conceptualizations of network and distance and comparative economic system frameworks, which may be fundamental for integrating theories in alternative finance, IB, and internationalization