Making Strategic Alliances and Networks Work Quiz-7

To protect against opportunism within an alliance relationship, a firm could minimize the threat by:

• walling off critical capabilities in a black box shared among members.

• swapping critical capabilities through credible commitments.

• eliminating hostage-taking.

• forming multiple weak ties.

A firm in an alliance is likely to have other interfirm alliances as well, which makes it important to:

• close the door to additional alliances.

• insist on direct monitoring and control.

• manage the relationships as a corporate portfolio.

• engage in upstream vertical alliances.

For equity-based alliances, the importance of direct organizational monitoring and control is:

• low.

• moderate.

• high.

• irrelevant.

The performance of an alliance can probably be best measured:

• by objective measures only.

• through an assessment of learning and experience.

• through an assessment of relational capabilities.

• by a combination of objective and subjective measures.

In measuring the performance of strategic alliances and networks, subjective measures include:

• market performance.

• stability.

• longevity.

• the level of managers’ satisfaction.

For non-equity-based alliances and networks, the nature of shared resources and the degree of tacitness and complexity are:

• low.

• moderate.

• high.

• irrelevant.

As a type of relationship tie, exploitation refers to such things as:

• selfishness.

• lack of choice.

• variation.

• execution.

A lower level of equity contribution may indicate a firm’s lack of:

• commitment.

• learning and experience.

• understanding of nationality similarities.

• relational capabilities

Firm X is considering strategic distribution alliance with Firm A. What type of alliance would this be considered?

• Value-added alliance

• Horizontal alliance

• Downstream vertical alliance

• Upstream vertical alliance

Cooperation between rivals is usually suspected of being:

• tacit collusion.

• explicit collusion.

• a collaborative capability.

• a relational advantage.