The moderating effect of interdependence on contracts in achieving equity versus efficiency in interfirm relationships

The varying roles of governance mechanisms on ex-post transaction costs and relationship commitment in buyer-supplier relationships

“…Symmetric dependence corroborates the idiosyncratic relationship-specific investments by both partners (Khalid & Ali, 2017;Shen et al, 2017;Liu et al, 2017b) and enhance relationship commitment by creating interdependence between them. A high level of symmetrical interdependence is characterized by mutual investments indicating loyalty and cooperative longterm relationship (Caniëls & Gelderman, 2007).…”

“…These co-specialized investments create interdependence between partners, prior research, therefore argued that symmetric interdependence is a product of both partners' equal dependence on each other by investing jointly in a relationship (e.g., Kumar et al, 1995;Wu & Wu, 2015). On the other hand, asymmetric dependence effects on coercive power of less dependent partner to exploit, and creates prospects for opportunism and conflict (Liu et al, 2017b;Shen et al, 2017). Therefore, high level of symmetric dependence enhances the joint motivation of forbearance and relational embeddedness between partners, and discourages individual private goal seeking by binding and locking firms to a particular course of action (Young-Ybarra & Wiersema, 1999;Schmitz et al, 2016).…”

“…However, once the relationship is developed and adequate level of trust and symmetrical interdependence is attained, relationship partners become more loyal to each other (Liu et al, 2009) and expect continuous future transactions, thereby resulting in lower transaction costs. On the other hand, asymmetric interdependence can be counterproductive because less dependent partner dominates the relationship and exploits its weaker counterpart (Shen et al, 2017;Caniëls & Gelderman, 2007) thereby resulting in lower commitment and higher transaction costs (Casciaro & Piskorski, 2005). A fear of high switching costs enhances the relationship partners' interest in maintaining a quality relationship and commitment (Morgan & Hunt, 1994).…”

How entrepreneurial orientation affects R&D alliance performance: the moderating roles of competitive intensity and dependence on the partner

“…When a firm with very high EO levels relies heavily on its partner, the partner is in a position to provide important and irreplaceable resources (Kumar et al, 1995;Villena et al, 2019). Opportunistic behavior by the EO firm may cause conflict and even retaliatory acts from the partner, such as early termination of the collaboration, with little longterm advantage (Shen et al, 2017;Wang et al, 2019). Therefore, although a firm with excessively high EO is in a position to behave opportunistically and has strong motivation to do so, it may nevertheless curb such misbehavior for reasons of self-interest, which facilitates ongoing cooperation between partners.…”

“…High EO, being associated with extreme pursuit of innovation and first-mover advantage, is likely to increase the difficulty of coordinating alliance activities (Das and Teng, 2001;Parkhe, 1993). However, when an EO firm relies on its partner, the partner may have less incentive to expend effort on coordination, as such effort will increase the partner's costs (Shen et al, 2017). Consequently, to obtain important and irreplaceable resources from the partner (Kumar et al, 1995), or to avoid coordination conflict, a firm with very high EO may curb its aggressive action in innovation within the R&D alliance.…”