Interfirm Rivalry and Managerial Complexity: A Conceptual Framework of Alliance Failure
整合多学科理论，构建了一个概念框架，从企业间竞争和管理复杂性两个角度解释战略联盟失败的原因，并提出了联盟发展的过程模型。
Empirical research indicates that more than half of strategic alliances fail, and the outcomes of alliance failure can be devastating. Despite the increased concern about managing strategic alliances, the field still lacks a theoretical framework to describe the conditions and dynamics leading to the failure of strategic alliances. This paper attempts to distill, derive, and integrate theories across different disciplines into a unified framework that offers a better understanding of alliance failure. The conceptual framework focuses on two primary sources of alliance failure: interfirm rivalry and managerial complexity. We propose that strategic alliances fail because of the opportunistic hazards as each partner tries to maximize its own individual interests instead of collaborative interests. Also, strategic alliances fail because of the difficulties in coordinating two independent firms (i.e., coordination costs), and in aligning operations at the alliance level with parent firms’ long-term goals (i.e., agency costs). The paper extends the theoretical framework by looking into a process model of alliance development and failure.