Successful companies in the information technology sector pursue alliances and acquisitions as a way to compete and grow. It is, however, not clear if these strategies work in all situations. In this study we look at 103 alliances in the packaged software industry over a period of four years (1999–2002). Combining the economic theory of complementarities with a concept that captures the relatio...

Departing from prior work that demonstrates the stickiness and stability of alliance networks resulting from embeddedness, we extend matching theory to study firms’ withdrawal from alliances. Viewing alliance withdrawal as a result of firms’ pursuit of more promising alternative partners – outside options – rather than failures in collaboration, we predict that a firm is more likely to withdraw...

Departing from prior work that demonstrates the stickiness and stability of alliance networks resulting from embeddedness, we extend matching theory to study firms‟ withdrawal from alliances. Viewing alliance withdrawal as a result of firms‟ pursuit of more promising alternative partners – outside options – rather than failures in collaboration, we predict that a firm is more likely to withdraw...

Considering knowledge management (KM) in alliances has become increasingly important regarding the key role of knowledge as an essential resource shared through collaboration. However, alliance partners always find it challenging to successfully manage the knowledge acquired by cooperation. In particular, small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) that suffer from resource and expertise scarcity...

Received: 7 June 2007 Accepted: 10 September 2008 Abstract From the resource-based view, strategic alliances can be defined by a long-term cooperative arrangement between two or more independent firms that exchange and share resources to gain market power and competitive advantage. Since knowledge has become the critical element for firms to achieve competitive advantage, one goal of strategic ...

This paper examines interfirm knowledge transfers within strategic alliances. Using a new measure of changes in alliance partners' technological capabilities, based on the citation patterns of their patent portfolios. we analyze changes in the extent to which partner firms' technological resources 'overlap' as a result of alliance participation. This measure allows us to test hypothesesfrom the...

In the recent rapidly changing environment of the Digital Economy, business-to-business (B2B) electronic markets are adopting cooperative strategies in lieu of competitive strategies in order to obtain resources so that they can succeed in the market. This paper aims to develop formal theory-based understanding of a range of observed cooperative strategies by conducting an empirical study of B2...

In Shark Bay, Western Australia, male bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops sp.) cooperate in pairs and triplets to sequester and control the movements of females. We refer to this behavior as "herding" and to the male pairs and triplets as alliances. During a 25-month study (1987-1989) on the social relationships of males, we documented herding in 10 alliances. Males preferentially herded nonpregnant ...

This paper investigates the impact of technological alliances on the technical and economical performance of regions in the EU-27 area. While recent research mainly focused on spillovers and externalities, especially on industry-science interactions, it can be noticed that limited attention has been paid to the whole spectrum of interactions (alliances) that could be present within a (regional)...

A distinctive feature of stock options is that they create incentives for managers to take more risks. For a sample of 12,071 firm-year observations over 1992-2003, we find that the risk-taking incentives of executive stock options (the sensitivity of ESO values to stock return volatility) are significantly associated with greater risk-taking behavior, measured by corporate alliances, in the fo...