Foreign divestment research has focused on identifying divestment drivers but has only rarely investigated the long-term divestment behavior of companies. This study uses longitudinal case studies to explore the foreign market exit behavior of all seven of the ten largest store-based retailers in the world that had exited any foreign market between 2005 and 2020. It considers the three main theoretical perspectives in the field of strategic management, i.e., the industry-based, the resource-based, and the institution-based view. We find that retail market exits are often connected actions within certain epochs. The resource-based view seems the most appropriate strategic view to explain retailers’ long-term market exit behavior because their exits are often triggered by their idiosyncratic resources. However, we find some common patterns across the retailers’ market exit behavior that show the relevance of the industry-based and the institution-based view. Furthermore, the study detects the recently increasing phenomenon of partial exits which can be explained by the real options theory.

国外的撤资研究主要集中于识别撤资驱动因素，但很少调查公司的长期撤资行为。本研究采用纵向案例研究来探讨 2005 年至 2020 年间全球十大实体零售商中全部七家退出国外市场的行为。它考虑了战略领域的三个主要理论观点。管理观，即产业观、资源观、制度观。我们发现零售市场的退出往往是特定时期内的关联行为。基于资源的观点似乎是解释零售商长期市场退出行为的最合适的战略观点，因为他们的退出往往是由其特殊资源触发的。然而，我们发现零售商的市场退出行为存在一些共同模式，这些模式显示了基于行业和基于机构的观点的相关性。此外，该研究发现最近增加的部分退出现象可以用实物期权理论来解释。