To Acquire or to Ally? The Impact of Strategic Emphasis on Governance Mode Choice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In pursuit of growth, firms often rely on outside options and choose a specific governance mode (acquisitions or alliances) to manage their external partnerships. In such pursuits, a firm's strategic emphasis (i.e., relative focus on value appropriation vs. value creation) could be crucial in determining appropriate governance mode choice. In this article, the authors draw on transaction cost economics and the resource-based view to articulate and empirically assess the impact of strategic emphasis on governance mode choice using a large panel of publicly listed U.S. firms. They also identify and test two boundary conditions: chief marketing officer (CMO) presence and analyst coverage of the firm. The results indicate that firms with a greater strategic emphasis on value appropriation relative to value creation are more likely to prefer acquisitions over alliances. Further, the positive impact of strategic emphasis on the likelihood of choosing acquisitions over alliances is weakened both with CMO presence and with increasing analyst coverage of the firm. These results provide insights on how a firm's strategic emphasis might impact its choice of governance mode in the presence of CMO and analyst coverage.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".