The Contingent Effect of Alliance Design on Alliance Dynamics and Performance: An Experimental Study

Tobias Kretschmer, Albert Banal-Estanol, Jo Seldeslachts and Debrah Meloso

No 12512, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: A core question in alliance research is how alliance design influences alliance success. Two underexplored aspects of this question are whether the effect of alliance design is contingent on the external competitive environment and how alliance design affects the behavioral dynamics in an alliance. We address these aspects by studying two core dimensions of alliance design, the level of commitment in an alliance and the number of alliance partners. We match two competitive environments, high and low competition, with different alliance designs and vary the number of alliance partners and the level of commitment and experimentally study the aggregate performance and behavioral dynamics of the different alliance designs. We find that with low competition, alliance design does not affect performance much, while with high competition, alliance performance depends heavily on alliance design. Regarding dynamics, we find that aggregate performance is most strongly affected by first-period behavior, while the willingness to forgive a partner's non-cooperative behavior has a more muted effect on alliance performance.

Keywords: Organization design; Laboratory experiment; Strategic alliances (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com and nep-exp
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP12512 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:12512

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP12512

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().