查看文章

Most of the theory of the firm examines whether a transaction should take place within the firm or the market, but hybrid arrangements are increasingly common, particularly in hightechnology industries. Successful innovation requires several ingredients: facilities, funds, human capital, incentives, and technology, among others. Firms often lack one or more of these ingredients. For example, small R&D firms often have know-how and incentives but lack other ingredients, and while large client firms have the other ingredients, they lack the required know-how and cannot replicate the incentive structure of the R&D firms. Strategic alliances are a way for two or more firms to combine ingredients without bearing the costs associated with merging or setting up a joint venture. Alliances have proved to be a popular way of organizing R&D, and interest in studying them has grown in recent years2. Given the growing popularity of alliances, it is important to understand how they are organized. Our goal is to develop and test a simple model that predicts when minority equity links are used in strategic alliances. A minority equity link is formed when the client buys less than 50% of the R&D firms equity3. The allies remain distinct entities. In contrast,