Investment and Firm Performance Variability

Purpose - The study analyzed 90 online firms worldwise and observed them for ten years to investigate their investments and firm performance variabilities. This study attemped to verify the existence of agency problems in online firms. Through this, the paper intends to expand the scope of research in the fields of investment and firm value both empirically and in theory. This study also attempted to supplement the insufficient logic of previous studies by analyzing the relationship between investment and profitability. Design/methodology - In this study, the investment is subdivided into over-, under-, and neutral investments, and an empirical analysis of the firm performance was conducted. As investment generally has long-term effects, the impact of a firm's investment on future firm performance and variabilities in firm performance was considered over the short-and medium-term period. Findings - It was found that there was a negative relationship between firms with an overinvestment and future firm performance. Underinvestment has no clear statistically significant results on firm performance. This implies that overinvestment causes more reduction in future firm performance than underinvestment. It was also found that underinvestment and overinvestment significantly increased the variability of firm performance. A positive significance was found between under- and over- investment with a variability of 3 years and overinvestment with a variability of 4 years in the future. A negative relationship was found between neutral investment propensity and future performance variabilities. Neutral investment has less effect on the future performance variability of a firm than a firm’s overinvestment and underinvestment. For online firms, underinvestment and overinvestment have a greater effect on the firm's future performance variability than neutral investment. Originality/value - The agency theory predicts that information asymmetry and adverse selection problems exacerbate conflicts of interest among stakeholders, thus firm performance. The study contributed to accumulating research on online firms that are currently underexplored by analyzing the investment behavior of major firms in the online industry.