Transaction cost perspectives on alliances and joint ventures: explanatory power and empirical limitations

Klaus Meyer and Yi Wang

Chapter 4 in Handbook on International Alliance and Network Research, 2015, pp 87-136 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Transaction cost economics (TCE) has been extensively applied by international business scholars to analyze joint ventures and strategic alliances. It provides a theoretical basis to analyze how firms organize their transactions with other firms, and hence their choices of governance structures, for example, between JVs and other organizational forms. However, TCE has also been frequently critiqued and empirical findings on some of the constructs derived from TCE find inconsistent results. This chapter critically evaluates the TCE literature on cross-border business activity to evaluate to what extent this empirical literature actually supports or refutes TCE-based arguments, and to provide directions for future research. We identify four major challenges: (1) the level of analysis used to proxy transaction costs, (2) contextual drivers of transaction costs, especially in emerging economies, (3) the theoretical ambiguity of TCE arguments with respect to distance and experience, and (4) the assumption that JVs are a flexible (low-risk) mode of operation. This discussion leads to suggestions on how to design empirical research more consistent with the theory.

Keywords: Business and Management (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/view/9781783475476.00010.xml (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable

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:elg:eechap:15803_4

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Darrel McCalla ().