| With the rapid development of competitive strategic alliances in areas of firms'technology research and development, manufacturing, commerce and trade etc., theoretic exploration of competitive alliances has been increasingly concerned about by the academic community. While there have been some research results on it, additional theoretical and empirical analysis are still needed to put emphasis upon national conditions of structural behavior pattern and performance change of firms in competitive alliance, for the existing research paid little attention to characteristics of China's current stage of economic development, institutional transition and so on. Additionally, issues related to underlying preconditions to the formation of competitive alliances, such as the national economic and technological level of development, industrial structural conditions, etc., need to be further addressed. Furthermore, there are still far less literature concerning practical issues of competitive alliance activities to help improve managerial practice. On the other hand, however, with the progress of science and technology accelerating and the competition condition for domestic market being intensified since China entered WTO, Chinese firms have been facing fundamental changes in their business environment. As a development of practice and theory in international strategic management field, competitive alliances provide us a heuristic approach to enhance Chinese firms'managerial skills and technical capacity. Thus, the theoretical and empirical analysis of competitive alliance focusing on national conditions of China will be able to further enrich the existing theory, and also to provide business and government sectors with better decision-making reference.In the analytical perspectives of formation, governance and performance of competitive alliances, with concerns of realistic conditions in China, this thesis theoretically and empirically analyzes the impact of sectoral features on competitive alliances'formation, competitive partners'relational capital on alliances'governance structure, participation in competitive alliances on firms'performance, and tries paying special attention to practical matters of competitive alliances activities. Contributions of this thesis lie in the following.Firstly, by applying the economic model of internalization theory to analyzing the selection mechanism of sectoral conditions for competitive alliances formation, this thesis comes up with rules of competitive alliances'appearance within a particular sector captured by technological innovation rate and market size, indicating that competition-oriented alliances tend to appear in sectors with a small market size and a high rate of technological innovation, whereas cooperation-oriented alliances emerge more frequently in sectors with a large market scale and low rate of technological innovation, and that coopetition-based alliances tend be formed in industries with either a large market scale and a high rate of technological innovation, or a small market scale and a low rate of technological innovation. Though data from Chinese manufacturing sectors reflecting technological innovation rate and market size, we develop a two-dimensional dichotomy, upon which empirical events of competitive alliances collected through the method of literature-based competitive alliance counting are matched between their industrial sectors and the specific types of alliance orientation to further indicate the selection of competitive alliances in the context of a particular manufacturing sector. For example, our results indicate that sectors such as transportation equipment, communications, computer and electronic equipment, chemical materials and chemical products, general-purpose equipment, special equipment, electrical machinery and equipment manufacturing industry, tend to form coopetition-based competitive alliances. Our conclusions provide a clear reference basis for both business and government to deal with different types of competitive alliances activities, and also bridge the existing literature to an industry level analysis.Secondly, in the perspective of relational capital we construct a theoretical model to investigate the impact of competitive alliance partners'relational capital on governance modes of the alliance, and find out that the relationship between relational capital and the alliance's governance structure lies in the tendency that as relational capital accumulates, governance structure of competitive alliances evolve firstly from internalization, to equity alliance, contract alliance and then to market. The managerial phenomenon empirically posted by an interviewing case study goes well with the theoretical expectation.Thirdly, based on a valid sample of 116 Chongqing firms cooperating with their competitors, this thesis empirically investigates the impact of the coopetition strategy implemented through competitive alliances on firms'technological innovation performance. Empirical Results from testing methods of Mediate Effect Model and Structural Equation Model both imply that coopetition strategy could significantly enhance firms'technological innovation performance and that the stimulus of coopetition is deeper than mere competition or cooperation, the path of which indicated by further investigation lies in the mechanism that competition between firms enhances innovation performance through the intermediary effect of cooperation. Hence, our results indicate that cooperative relationship between competing firms plays an important role in the link of competition-cooperation-technological innovation, and it is the bottleneck of improving innovation performance by coopetition, which provides an empirical support for paying more attention to technical cooperation between Chinese rival firms.Finally, we develop an identifiable conceptual model of typology of competitive alliance by providing two available two-dimensional models for recognition of competitive alliance partner's complimentary and substitution, upon which we construct a model of technological paradigm, depicting the relationship between levels of firm's technological capability and types of competitive alliances with the two basic dimensions of complimentary and substitution between competitive alliance partners. It is claimed in the model that, at the initial stage of technological development within one technological paradigm cooperation-oriented competitive alliance tends to be mainly adopted, at the growth phase coopetition-based competitive alliance tends to appear more while at the advanced stage of technological capability development competition-oriented is the dominated form of competitive alliance; Therefore, incremental innovation within one technological paradigm could be better organized by cooperation-oriented as well as coopetition-based alliance, whereas radical innovation between different paradigms tends to be coordinated better through competition-oriented competitive alliance. We further provide policy implications from this model for government departments to develop related technological policies according to sectors'specific technological conditions in order to upgrade Chinese industrial capacity. In the mean time we propose managerial suggestions for firms on how to better engage in competitive alliance practices, for example, legal forms of cooperation-oriented alliance could be preferably chosen as equity investment or joint ventures, and for competition-oriented alliance it should be considered more as a contract-based form, such as R&D contracts, cooperative projects, etc., while coopetition-based alliance mainly prefers joint venture, the form between the tight equity control and loose contracts. Such discussions about practical concerns with competitive alliance activities, not only contribute to make up the ignorance of competitive alliances practices in the current literature, but also provide Chinese enterprises and government departments a frame of reference for further scientific decision-making policies.
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