The purpose of this paper is to investigate how emerging and developed market multinationals (EMMs and DMMs) differ in their acquisition behavior (vis-à-vis the choice of partial versus full acquisitions) when entering a developed market economy, Japan. We hypothesize that EMMs prefer partial acquisitions, whereas DMMs prefer full acquisitions due to what we call the country-of-origin effect. Additionally, we hypothesize that this country-of-origin effect is more pronounced for smaller firms. The results, based upon 224 strategic cross-border acquisitions in Japan, support these two hypotheses. This study contributes to the literature on EMMs.