Do Strategic Alliances, Acquisitions, and R&D Investments Act as Complements or Substitutes?

Martynov Aleksey ()
Additional contact information
Martynov Aleksey: University of Houston Clear Lake, Houston, Texas United States

Foundations of Management, 2016, vol. 8, issue 1, 7-20

Abstract: This paper studies possible complementarities and substitution effects between such strategic choices as alliances, acquisitions and internal R&D investments. The findings indicate that a firm’s absorptive capacity affects the presence of complementarities and substitution effects among those strategic choices. Firms with high absorptive capacity exhibit substitution effects between alliances and acquisitions and between alliances and internal R&D investments. Firms with high absorptive capacity also exhibit complementarities between acquisitions and additional R&D investments. These results were obtained from panel data of large and medium U.S. companies spanning the years 1998-2009. The results are robust to the use of different measures of performance: profitability, market-to-book value, and sales growth. This paper contributes to our understanding of the role of absorptive capacity for the optimal choice of inter-organizational strategy vs. greater internal R&D investments.

Keywords: alliances; acquisitions; R&D investments; absorptive capacity; firm performance; panel data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1515/fman-2016-0001 (text/html)

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:vrs:founma:v:8:y:2016:i:1:p:7-20:n:1

DOI: 10.1515/fman-2016-0001

Access Statistics for this article

Foundations of Management is currently edited by Tadeusz Krupa

More articles in Foundations of Management from Sciendo
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().