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If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation. AbstractPurpose -The purpose of this paper is to define co-exploitation, co-exploration, and alliance ambidexterity from the perspective of organizational learning; to analyze how knowledge bases, structural arrangements, and control mechanisms of R&D alliances influence co-exploitation and co-exploration; and to discuss how to achieve alliance ambidexterity by managing paradoxes around knowledge bases, structural arrangements, and control mechanisms. Design/methodology/approach -This is a conceptual paper focussing on how to balance exploitation and exploration at the alliance level through managing three paradoxes of cooperation: similarity vs complementarity, integration vs modularity, and contracts vs trust. Findings -While technological similarity, structural integration, and contracts are more likely to promote co-exploitation, technological complementarity, structural modularity, and trust are more likely to facilitate co-exploration. Alliance ambidexterity, which is beneficial for alliance performance, derives from either the combination of technological complementarity, structural integration, and contracts, or the combination of technological similarity, structural modularity, and trust temporally.Research limitations/implications -Researchers should analyze the possibility of building alliance ambidexterity in other types of interorganizational relationships, and find other possible antecedents of interorganizational learning. Practical implications -Managers should not simply treat R&D alliances as one of exploratory interorganizational relationships, but pay equal attention to co-exploitation and co-exploration. To achieve this balance, practitioners should combine technological complementarity with structural integration and contracts, or integrate technological similarity with structural modularity and trust. Originality/value -This paper is one of the first contributions that analyze how an R&D alliance could gain its ambidexterity through the management of nested cooperation paradoxes.

The debate on how firms govern their inter-organizational relationships to foster their business performance is far from being settled. While several arguments suggest both transactional and relational mechanisms may act as complementary or substitutive forces, this paper explores and demonstrates how both mechanisms can be jointly exploited to enhance performance. Adopting the context of the US equity underwriting market, this paper reveals that an issuer adopting a transactional governance mechanism to manage its inter-organizational relationships with underwriters obtains a lower cost offering (cost performance) but may not entail price premium (price performance) of that offering. In contrast, an issuer taking a relational governance mechanism has superior price performance but worse cost performance. Nevertheless, this paper uncovers that an issuer adopting a synthesized mechanism obtains better cost performance and price performance by leveraging the advantages from both of the transactional and relational mechanisms.

Focusing on global offshoring, this paper adapts the dynamic capabilities perspective to analyze how the structuring of offshoring disaggregation and geographical dispersion affects firm performance. While previous studies show that the returns on offshoring remain unclear, we present three findings that explain how the structuring of offshoring disaggregation and geographical dispersion influences firm performance. First, the larger the level of offshoring disaggregation, the better the firm performs. Second, the more geographical dispersion, the better the firm performs. Third, the effect of offshoring disaggregation on firm performance is greater when the firm structures and offshores its disaggregated value chain activities to dispersed locations. While economies of scale and learning may guide firms to offshore many discrete activities of the value chain, firms are able to gain the most returns from the structuring of offshoring disaggregation when they reconfigure lots of offshoring projects implemented in dispersed locations where environmental dynamism concurs.Offshoring is an important strategic choice that has fascinated the scholars of transaction cost economics, the resource-based view, and international business (Boehe, 2010;

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