Research On Knowledge Alliance's Cooperation Innovation Based On Game Theory

In the era of knowledge economy of 21st century, knowledge has been gradually replacing traditional factors of production such as capital, labor and land to be the chief resource. With the knowledge economy's coming, in order to adapt such changes, more and more managers and scholars increasingly are paying attention to the knowledge management, and focusing on their abilities of knowledge management, especially on the most important part of knowledge management, the capacity of knowledge. Then how to increase the company's capacity of knowledge is one of the top topics attractive to managers and scholars. Establishing knowledge alliance as one of the most effective way to increase the capacity of knowledge, is also a good way to avoid the risk appearing during the innovation, so more and more attention has been paid to knowledge alliance. But many results of empirical studies and the research data show that the percentage of successful knowledge alliances is very slow. So how to improve the performance of knowledge alliance is the purpose of our study, which is based on the game theory.Most previous literature and research have answered the question such as how to choose alliance partners, how to take knowledge-management measures in knowledge alliance. But scholars neglect to take the question if cooperation innovation is much profit than innovation singly into account. Most of them are lack of considering the fundamental factors, such as the amount of knowledge sharing devoted to the knowledge alliance to gain profit as much as possible. This research tries to answer these two important questions. It summaries related literature on knowledge, knowledge management, knowledge alliance, and game theory. On the basis of previous literature, breakthrough of this paper is found out, and gives the deeply analyses.At first, the characteristics of knowledge alliance, on which the analyses depend, are illuminated. And then, combining the theory of game theory, it shows that before establishing the knowledge alliance the game process between the two alliance members is a kind of perfect information game model, which belongs to Stackelberg game model. On the basis of the definition of the game style of the process researched by this paper, it computes how much expenditure each company should devote to the knowledge alliance to gain optimization profit, and it also computes how much will the knowledge alliance gain under this numbers of devotion. But it shows that the optimization profit can be improved if the knowledge alliance members adopt some measures. In order to deeply make sure that the knowledge alliance will be successful, this paper suggests that the alliance members should do something in two different ways, which are separately improving the security of cooperation innovation process, rationalizing the distribution percentage of total profit gain by knowledge alliance. During the process of improving the security of cooperation innovation, the alliance members should take measures based on the object of knowledge-sharing, the subject of knowledge-sharing, and the condition of knowledge-sharing. And in the process of rationalizing the distribution percentage of total profit, the alliance members should combine the fairness preference theory into its judgment, not just only maximizing its profit gained.In the end, the article shows the conclusion of this paper, and the important implications at both a managerial and theoretical level. It also provides advices for improving the performance of two members of knowledge alliance, points out research limitations and expects the future research.