On The Sequence Patterns Of Inter-firm Cooperative Relationships: An Explorative-exploitative Perspective

Alliance behavior has become a common phenomenon,more and more scholars have studied the exploration alliance and exploitation alliance.Formation the sequence of alliance and use the coalition model can help enterprises better adapt to the changing environment and economy and develop themselves.In previous literatures,scholars have explored the relation of inter-firm alliance from different fields.However,these literatures have not classified the sequence patterns of inter-firm alliance relations,and also rarely adopt the exploration-exploitation alliance perspective.Therefore,this study not only can improve the content of the union literature,but also provide a theoretical basis for the classification of cooperative decision-making among enterprises.Throughout the literature,the research of sequence is mainly focus on the following three areas:(1)Research on decision-making literature,mainly examine the alliance between enterprises focusing on the single alliance or merger decision-making.(2)Research in the field of real options,takes an integrated perspective to examine the decision-making relationship between alliance and acquisition.(3)The study of evolutionary economics and organizational learning focuses on the analysis of inter-firm alliance in different periods,and which describes the repeated coalitions and acquisitions as a cyclic sequence of learning,re-evaluation and re-adjustment.Throughout the past,the literature on the sequence mainly examines the inter-relationship between the mergers and acquisitions among enterprises from the single sequence or the whole sequence,and rarely takes the whole sequence of cooperative relationships as object to examine whether the cooperative relationship follow the similar or different sequence pattern in different periods.This paper chooses 2003-2013 as the time span,taking 44 middle and low-tech enterprises in Fortune 500 as the research object,using the optimal matching technology and clustering analysis to study the sequence pattern of enterprise alliance from the exploration-exploitation alliance perspective.The results show that:(1)there is a significant sequence pattern between enterprises,which means that in the process of alliance enterprises follow similar or different decision-making relationship.There are five types of sequence patterns among firms: Exploratory alliance dominant sequence,exploitation alliance dominant sequence,dual strategic alliance sequence,pure exploration of alliance sequence,and pure exploitation of alliance sequence.(2)The comprehensive analysis of five kinds of sequences shows that the frequency of exploitation alliance is more than that of exploratory alliance,which indicates that low-tech enterprises are more inclined to choose exploitation alliance to developing itself because they did not invest more R&D.