Non-Cooperation - The Dark Side of Strategic Alliances

Strategic alliances can create competitive advantages for firms. But alliances also bring new risks. Managers must be realistic about firms' behaviours in alliances: non-cooperation can result in the failure of an alliance or a firm.

What factors generate non-cooperative impulses? What allows firms to act on them? How can alliances be structured to reduce opportunities for non-cooperation? This book explores the different influences on firms' attitudes toward cooperation and highlights the connections between these factors. The book also provides a framework for assessing how much alliance-partners need each other's resources, and to identify which firms are able to act on non-cooperative impulses.

A series of case studies operationalize the theory and the framework. The Microsoft case uses documents from its US antitrust trial to show how it used its partners' reliance on it to its advantage. The airline industry alliances and the Ballard case, which traces the development of commercial fuel-cell vehicles, show how firms use formal and informal structures to strengthen ties amongst alliance partners.