Africa Ariño

Contractual Renegotiations in Strategic Alliances

This study provides an empirical investigation of the incidence and antecedents of contractual renegotiations in strategic alliances. We bring together initial conditions based on transaction cost theory and ex post contingencies highlighted by recent conceptual and qualitative research on the evolution of collaborative agreements. The results indicate that firms tend to change the governance of alliances when a misalignment exists between the chosen governance structure and features of the transaction. Further, we find that asset specificity affects alliance design as well as post-formation governance decisions. Contractual alterations are also more likely when firms employ less extensive contractual safeguards in their alliances and when a parent firm’s strategy changes. We find no evidence that cross-border alliances are any more or less likely to experience contractual renegotiations than domestic alliances.

Effectiveness of Dyadic and Multi-Party Joint Ventures

Using data from 80 joint-venture (JV) experiences, this article compares the influence on JV effectiveness of two alternative ways of management: relational investment and formal control. Our results show that the adoption of one or another is contingent upon the number of partners: while relational investment significantly influences the effectiveness of dyadic JVs, formal control is pivotal in the case of multi-party JVs.

Alliance Dynamics for Entrepreneurial Firms

Small firms are thought to encounter various difficulties implementing strategic alliances. Due to these problems, they may be less able to reap the benefits of alliance adaptation, and the changes that do occur in alliances may not coincide with a small firms interests. The evidence we present on contractual renegotiations in alliances suggests that small firms are no more or less likely to adjust their alliances contracts in general. However, small firms tend to bear inefficiencies of two kinds in their collaborations. First, they are less likely to adapt alliances in the presence of governance misalignments. Second, our sampled small firms were more prone to make transaction-specific investments, which can stimulate ex post hold-up in the form of contractual renegotiations.

Rescuing troubled alliances... before it's too late

Based on case study research, the authors show how alliance failure often follows the opening of a gap between expectations and intermediate outcomes. Failure to detect and attribute the cause of a shortfall, followed by misunderstandings among the partners pave the way to failure. They provide some suggestions on how to rescue alliances in crisis.

Alliance Contractual Design

Our purpose in this paper is to provide an overview of what we know about alliance contracts. After a short introduction to the contents of alliance contracts, we start by contrasting alliance contractual form and governance form. Next, we focus on two related constructs: contractual complexity and contractual completeness. We suggest that contractual complexity is a more adequate construct to investigate in the absence of information about the transaction contemplated in the contract. After that, we present the measures of contractual complexity used in past studies. Then, we go over the determinants of contractual complexity by considering their influence on contracting costs and benefits given environmental and behavioral uncertainty. Conclusions and suggestions for research are offered at the end.

Contracts, Negotiation, and Learning: An Examination of Termination Provisions

Taking a temporal view of learning in partnerships, we argue that learning to contract from prior relationships can be manifested not only in an increase in the level of contractual detail but also in a decrease in negotiation time for a given level of contractual detail. We analyse the influence that the length of prior relationships and the detail of termination provisions have on negotiation time, or the time period that it takes for partners to reach a mutually acceptable agreement. We find that: (1) the length of prior relationships has a curvilinear, U-shaped effect on negotiation time, suggesting the possibility of diverse learning mechanisms as the relationship unfolds; (2) the impact of the detail of termination provisions on negotiation time varies across different types of termination provisions; and (3) it takes a shorter time to negotiate certain types of termination provisions when partners have longer prior relationships. Beyond suggesting the need to investigate the consequences of contractual provisions for collaborators, our study proposes negotiation time as an additional indicator of a learning-to-contract effect that complements existing ones.

To Do or Not to Do? Noncooperative Behavior by Commission and Omission in Interfirm Ventures

This article contributes to researchers’ understanding of interfirm collaboration by examining the interpartner relationship in terms of cooperative behavior. In particular, this article focuses on the effect that a firm’s perception of its partner’s behavior has on the firm’s own behavior. Noncooperative behavior is distinguished by omission and by commission. By analyzing questionnaire data from a sample of 81 companies, it is shown that a firm’s perception of its partner’s behavior has a stronger association with the firm’s own behavior when the partner is perceived to behave noncooperatively by commission than by omission.

Process issues in international alliance management: A debate on the evolution of collaboration

Abstract This is an unusual paper in that it consists of a series of contributions by a group of scholars with different perspectives on the critical processes of cross-border alliance collaboration and management. We focus on a single longitudinal analysis of a large, and ultimately unsuccessful, joint venture between two experienced global companies: Coca-Cola and Nestle. Starting from this common database, the authors offer diverse and often contradictory interpretations of the same events and of the responses undertaken by both partners. By confronting these various perspectives, we try to build a more robust set of theoretical constructs regarding the role of initial conditions, equity, and efficiency on the collaborative process. Furthermore, we develop the concept of relational quality as a proxy for inter-organizational trust and offer the proposition that it may have a non-linear relation to alliance success. Finally, we condense all the arguments into a set of propositions regarding process issues in alliance management and offer some guidelines for future research in this field.

MEASURING THE PERFORMANCE OF INTERNATIONAL LOGISTICS OUTSOURCING PARTNERSHIPS: A DYADIC PERSPECTIVE ANALYSIS

We analyze the validity of five performance measures of international logistics outsourcing partnerships, using information from both partners. Each partners assessment of performance is captured by a single construct, which underlies four of the measures. This construct, however, is different for each party. Consequently, we examine a focal partners perceptions of the other partners performance assessment, and show that these inter-party perceptions are a poor measure of the latters actual performance assessment.