Research Seminar: Competitive Antecedents of Alliance Formation

This talk discusses research on competitive dynamics in the management literature. The dynamics of competition in an industry have been investigated from varying theoretical angles and at different levels. At the industry level, structural analysis and strategic group research have been prominent areas of investigation while action-response and multimarket competition have been influential at the micro-level. The talk will conclude with the presentation of recent research investigating the impact of firms’ dyadic competitive conditions on their propensity to collaborate in the same industry. While previous research has widely focused on resource-based and relational explanations of alliance formation, these studies do not address the complexity of competitive relationships among firms and thus fail to properly explain collaboration. An analysis of firms in the U.S. hospital software industry between 1963 and 1991 addresses this gap by investigating, at the firm-dyad level, the impact of a set of factors that have been shown to influence firms’ competitive conditions: the degree to which firms are strategically similar and compete in more than one market.