联盟潮流的逻辑性——集群竞争扩张.pdfVIP

THE LOGIC OF ALLIANCE FADS: Why Collective Competition Spreads by Benjamin Gomes-Casseres Forthcoming in Mitchell P. Koza and Arie Y. Lewin, eds., Strategic Alliances and Firm Adaptation: A Coevolution Perspective (M.E. Sharpe, 2001). Associate Professor of International Business Graduate School of International Economics and Finance Brandeis University Waltham, MA 02254-9110 Tel: (781) 736-2264 Fax: (781) 736-2263 E-mail: ben@ © Benjamin Gomes-Casseres 2001 Please do not cite or copy without permission THE LOGIC OF ALLIANCE FADS Alliances often seem to spread in waves. In many businesses, a period of increasing alliance formation has been followed by a slowdown. In the computer hardware industry, for example, the formation of alliances increased dramatically in the first half of the 1980s and declined in the second half (see Figure 1). A new wave of alliance formation seemed to start in the early 1990s. Similar booms and busts in alliance formation appeared to have occurred in other industries, although no comprehensive data exist to show this conclusively. In the early 1990s, there were waves of alliance formation in the telecommunications, airline, health-care, and commercial real estate industries, to name a few examples. Biotechnology alliances were most popular in the mid- 1980s. Earlier, the late 1970s and early 1980s saw alliance waves in the automobile, aircraft, and chemicals industries. Historical data on the foreign operations of large U.S. manufacturing firms indicate an increase in the use of joint ventures in the late 1950s, followed by a sharp decline in the 1960s (Gomes-Casseres, 1988). These observations raise two related questions. First, why did firms in these industries increase their use