PurposeThe purpose of this conceptual paper is to examine how a focal firm's decision‐making biases at each stage of the alliance life cycle can cause alliance failures such as premature termination and less‐than‐expected productivity.Design/methodology/approachA dyadic decision‐making approach is used to examine the consequences of decision‐making biases in the evolution of alliances. Concrete cases are presented to substantiate the arguments.FindingsPaying insufficient attention to an alliance partner's behavior causes different judgmental mistakes or decision‐making biases at different stages of the alliance life cycle. These biases can lead to alliance failure.Research limitations/implicationsDyadic decision making provides a framework to explain persistent but poorly understood dysfunctional behavior in alliances. Although previous authors have acknowledged that safeguards and trust are effective ways to reduce dysfunctional behavior, their mechanisms are still unclear. The paper's arguments suggest that decision‐making biases may serve as crucial mediators of the relationship between governance designs (safeguards or trust) and alliance outcomes. Future work can provide evidence to verify this postulate.Practical implicationsDecision‐making biases emerge in the evolution of alliances and influence alliance performance. Understanding the influence of biases helps to prevent their negative effects and reduces the probability of alliance failure.Originality/valueDyadic decision making provides a behavioral framework that complements traditional economic and organizational perspectives in explaining interorganizational decision‐making outcomes in the real world. Three kinds of biases – overconfidence, single outcome calculation, and adjustment and anchoring – are discussed in the paper. The paper addresses how these biases can emerge in the alliance life cycle and lead to various types of dysfunctional behavior, which, in turn, may cause alliance failures such as premature termination and less‐than‐expected productivity.

Quantum dot light-emitting diodes (QLEDs) are an emerging class of optoelectronic devices with a wide range of applications. However, there still exist several drawbacks preventing their applications, including long-term stability, electron leakage, and large power consumption. To circumvent the difficulties, QLEDs based on a self-assembled hole transport layer (HTL) with reduced device complexity are proposed and demonstrated. The self-assembled HTL is prepared from poly[3-(6-carboxyhexyl)thiophene-2,5-diyl] (P3HT-COOH) solution in N,N-dimethylformamide (DMF) forming a well-ordered monolayer on an indium-tin-oxide (ITO) anode. The P3HT-COOH monolayer has a smaller HOMO band offset and a sufficiently large electron barrier with respect to the CdSe/ZnS quantum dot (QD) emission layer, and thus it is beneficial for hole injection into and electron leakage blocking from the QD layer. Interestingly, the QLEDs exhibit an excellent conversion efficiency (97%) in turning the injected electron–hole pairs into light emission. The performance of the resulting QLEDs possesses a low turn-on voltage of +1.2 V and a maximum external quantum efficiency of 25.19%, enabling low power consumption with high efficiency. Additionally, those QLEDs also exhibit excellent long-term stability without encapsulation with over 90% luminous intensity after 200 days and superior durability with over 70% luminous intensity after 2 h operation under the luminance of 1000 cd m–2. The outstanding device features of our proposed QLEDs, including low turn-on voltage, high efficiency, and long-term stability, can advance the development of QLEDs toward facile large-area mass production and cost-effectiveness.

Higher data transmission rates, broader bandwidths, better privacy, and security are indispensable for the current information‐explosive age. However, to achieve the desired functionalities still remains as a great challenge. In this study, a two‐terminal, vertical dual‐gate phototransistor, which can be controlled by light, electric and magnetic fields, is proposed, fabricated, and demonstrated. This phototransistor uses a tandem structure composed of an organic solar cell (OSC) of ITO/ZnO/P3HT:PC61BM/MoO3/Ag, a resistive random access memory (RRAM) of Ag/PMMA/Au and a magnetoelectric film with micropyramid structure of PDMS:FeNi/silver nanowires (AgNWs). This device integrates and couples the properties of each individual component enabling to respond to light, electric and magnetic fields and works as a dual‐gate transistor. Compared with conventional transistors, the proposed device carries several intriguing features, such as ultrafast photoresponse time of 3 µs, controllable photocurrent with a variety of external stimuli, high ON/OFF ratio greater than 103, and touchless human–machine interaction. All of the above features are beneficial for high‐speed optical communication and circuit miniaturization. Furthermore, its unique logical characteristics show great potential for information security in the future development of Li‐Fi optical communication.

Hyperbolic metamaterials (HMMs) have attracted considerable attention due to its enhanced light-matter interaction for tuning photonic density of states and producing bulk plasmon polariton (BPP). In this study, we demonstrate...

Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET) is a well-known physical phenomenon, which has been widely used in a variety of fields, spanning from chemistry, and physics to optoelectronic devices. In this study, giant enhanced FRET for donor-acceptor CdSe/ZnS quantum dot (QD) pairs placed on top of Au/MoO3 multilayer hyperbolic metamaterials (HMMs) has been realized. An enhanced FRET transfer efficiency as high as 93% was achieved for the energy transfer from a blue-emitting QD to a red-emitting QD, greater than that of other QD-based FRET in previous studies. Experimental results show that the random laser action of the QD pairs is greatly increased on a hyperbolic metamaterial by the enhanced FRET effect. The lasing threshold with assistance of the FRET effect can be reduced by 33% for the mixed blue- and red-emitting as QDs compared to the pure red-emitting QDs. The underlying origins can be well understood based on the combination of several significant factors, including spectral overlap of donor emission and acceptor absorption, the formation of coherent closed loops due to multiple scatterings, an appropriate design of HMMs, and the enhanced FRET assisted by HMMs.