An Empirical Study On The Relationship Among Asset Specificity, Contractual Complexity And Cooperative Effect Of Strategic Alliances

With growing global competition, the strategy model of enterprises gradually turns to pursue flexibility, efficiency and innovation from the pure pursuit of product efficiency and low cost. It's very difficult for a single enterprise to have an advantage position in all of these areas, thus, a kind of new strategic model- strategic alliance emerged. Through alliances with other companies, enterprises can better achieve their strategic goals, reduce risk and gain competitive advantage. Therefore, alliance became an important strategic choice for many enterprises.Since the choice of cooperation, then the issues related to cooperation effect becomes one of the most concerned problems of all companies. Based on the results about strategic alliance which have been got by former scholars,this paper emphasizes on how asset specificity and contractual complexity influences the cooperative effect,and how asset specificity influences contractual complexity in strategic alliances.Then conceptual model and hypotheses are posed.Structural equation model is used in this paper . The steps of empirical research are listed as below: First, the conceptual model and a primary questionnaire are formed based on literature research. After the pre-test by experts,the questionnaire for pilot study is formed. Secondly, we gave the exploratory factor analysis on the data collected in the first pilot study, then the pilot questionnaire was modified and the formal questionnaire was developed according to the result.Then the large sample data was collected by survey to enterprises from Shenzhen city. Reliability of each variable's index system was tested with SPSS16.0 and accordingly the index system was improved.Finally, validity of each variable's index system and the concept model was verified with AMOS7.0,and the conclusion of this research was obtained: in strategic alliance, asset specificity has positive effect on the contractual complexity;at the same time, asset specificity has positive effect on alliance performance and the alliance risk;what's more, contractual complexity has positive effect on alliance performance but negative effect on alliance risk. Furthermore, this article analysed the impact of asset specificity and contractual complexity on the dimensions of alliance performance separatedly, and gave a theoretical explanation for the final results.According to conclusion of this article, in order to get better cooperative effect, enterprises should pay more attention to the specificity degree of assets and opportunities in strategic alliances,and then choose the suitable contracts according to their own needs.