Competitive embeddedness: The impact of competitive relations among a firm's current alliance partners on its new alliance formations

Gunno Park, Marco JinHwan Kim and Jina Kang

International Business Review, 2015, vol. 24, issue 2, 196-208

Abstract: Over the last decades, alliance portfolio has been an important research area within the management and international business fields. Since engaging in multiple alliances provides many advantages to firms, the extant literature rather highlights the positive side of alliance portfolios. But, at the same time, focal firms of alliance portfolios sometimes suffer from competitive relations among their partners. By applying a competitive embeddedness lens, we examine the influence of competitive relations among partners within an alliance portfolio on the focal firm's alliance formations. Also, we examine the role of the focal firm's resources which moderate the relation between competition among its partners and its alliance formations. We investigated 2539 cases of global technology alliances in the biopharmaceutical industry from 2002 to 2006 through negative binomial regression. Our findings indicate that a holistic approach toward alliance portfolios to prevent competition among partners is significant for sustainable alliance strategies. Moreover, we suggest that firm resources which attract partners also lessen the impact of competition among alliances.

Keywords: Alliance portfolios; Competitive embeddedness; Competitive relations; Embeddedness; Firm resources; Strategic alliances (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0969593114001140
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:iburev:v:24:y:2015:i:2:p:196-208

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/133/bibliographic
http://www.elsevier. ... me/133/bibliographic

DOI: 10.1016/j.ibusrev.2014.07.009

Access Statistics for this article

International Business Review is currently edited by P. Ghauri

More articles in International Business Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().