This paper investigates stock market responses to the different constellations of firm-level corporate governance mechanisms by focusing on foreign IPOs in the U.S. We build on sociology-grounded research on financial market behavior and suggest a "nested" legitimacy framework to explore U.S. investor perceptions of foreign IPO value. Using a fuzzy-set theoretic methodology, we demonstrate how different combinations of monitoring and incentive-based corporate governance mechanisms lead to the same level of investor valuations of firms. Moreover, institutional factors related to the minority shareholder protection strength in the foreign IPO's home country represent a boundary condition that affects the number of governance mechanisms required to achieve U.S. investors' high value perceptions. Our findings contribute to the sociological perspective on comparative corporate governance and the inter-dependencies between organizations and institutions.