Unilateral commitment in alliances: an optional behaviour

Abstract

Purpose – The coordination difficulties and risks inherent to business conduct are magnified in alliance relationships, posing a greater challenge for partners. The purpose of this paper is to propose real option perspective to examine how relational risk perceptions shape commitment behaviour in biotechnology alliance relationships.Design/methodology/approach – The hypotheses are tested with survey data on 344 alliance relationships of European Biotechnology small to medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs).Findings – This paper suggests that commitment can be seen as a real option, which reduces the degree of asymmetry of information concerning a partner's behaviour. The findings stress that endogenous uncertainty makes unilateral commitment more attractive, but the conclusion does not show that it enhance perceived relationship effectiveness for the party that unilaterally commits in a unique time period.Research limitations/implications – Nevertheless, within this paper the real options logic to alliance commi...