In August 2016, Prof. Guo Chaoyang, from the marketing department of SMXMU, as a corresponding author, with Prof. Fang Er, the chair professor of SMXMU, Prof. Lee Jongkuk, from Ewha Womans University and Prof. Palmatier Robert, from Washington University, co-published an essay titled “Understanding the Effects of Plural Marketing Structures on Alliance Performance” on Journal of Marketing Research (Vol.53-4), one of the top international journals in the field of marketing. The journal is one of the top 24 internationally recognized journals in the Economics and Management category of UT / DALLAS and one of the top 50 academic journals of business schools in Financial Times.
The essay mainly studies the multilateral relations in the enterprise alliance. Despite the growing popularity of multi-alliance, a great amount of research still continue to emphasize the importance of the dualistic alliance structure. The essay argues that learning and dependence balancing is an important factor in understanding the relative performance differences between the multi-alliance structure and the dualistic alliance structure, and it is also the decisive factor to promote the high-efficient cooperation among the multi-alliance members. The authors conducts two mutual-complementary experiments to examine the impact of the dualistic alliance structure and the multi-alliance structure on alliance performance in high-tech industries. The results indicates that when the cooperation extends to the product-related tasks, or when the upstream companies have more alliance experience, or when the industry grows fast, the multi-alliance structure is better than the dualistic alliance structure. On the contrary, when the upstream market is highly competitive, the performance of the dualistic alliance structure is better. The second experiment mentioned in the essay focuses on the study of the structure of the multi-alliance itself. The results show that horizontal relationship factors (namely, the degree of market overlap among the downstream firms and their original relationships) will interact with the alliance experience and reputation of the upstream enterprises, and increase the upstream enterprises’ rate of return.
