Over the last twenty years a wave of consolidation has swept through the oceanic liner shipping industry, leaving the industry dominated by a small number of large firms organized into a handful of strategic alliances. As liner shipping is the dominant form of international transportation these changes have likely had a substantial impact of the global trading system. This paper empirically exa...

We propose the first network-based theory of alliance formation. Our theory suggests that, in addition to key state and dyad attributes already established by the literature, the evolution of the alliance network from any given point in time is largely determined by its structure. Specifically, we argue that closed triangles in the alliance network – where i is allied with j is allied with k is...

Over the last two decades the world economy has dramatically transformed, with strategic alliances and partnerships across industrial and global boundaries becoming an important means to maintaining and regaining competitive positioning. In spite of an increase in partnership activity, alliances continue to face problems fuelled by factors such as partner opportunism, and cultural incompatibili...

Let G be a graph with vertex set V (G) and edge set E(G). A defensive alliance in G is a subset S of V (G) such that for every vertex v ∈ S, |N [v] ∩ S| ≥ |(V (G)−N [v]) ∩ S|. A global defensive alliance is an alliance that is also a dominating set. We define the alliance partition number, ψa(G) (global alliance partition number, ψg(G)), to be the maximum number of sets in a partition of V (G) ...

today, the rapid and accelerating developments in the regional and international levels have caused countries to move towards greater integration and cooperation. this, in turn, triggered a new coalitions or alliances and strengthens old alliances, or even weaken. the emerging economic powers (brics) is one of these alliances and institutions that began its activities in 2009. the aim of the ne...

We investigate the relationship between global offensive k-alliances and some characteristic sets of a graph including r-dependent sets, τ dominating sets and standard dominating sets. In addition, we discuss the close relationship that exist among the (global) offensive ki-alliance number of Γi, i ∈ {1, 2} and the (global) offensive k-alliance number of Γ1×Γ2, for some specific values of k. As...

Global Software Alliances (GSAs) are a relatively new organizational form that firms are increasingly adopting to meet their software development needs. These relationships are fraught with complexity given the temporal, spatial and cultural separation of the firm contracting out the software development work and the firm doing the development. In this paper, we focus on the challenge of standa...

This essay explores the distinction between federations and alliances and asks the question: When will states choose to federate rather than ally? William Riker (1964) argues that a necessary condition for a federal state’s formation is that those offering the federal bargain must seek to "expand their territorial control, usually either to meet an external military or diplomatic threat or to p...