The New Economy The Size Of The Supply Chain Alliance Border Issues

Supply chain alliance is a long-term and dynamic contract relationship on a supply chain, and it is a new tendency of corporate organization. This paper reviewed the academic development of transaction governance, competence of the firm and core competence of the firm, and pointed out that supply chain alliance is a kind of governance structure, in the same way as pure market and pure firm, and is the system of knowledge division based on the heterogeneity of the knowledge resource among firms. This paper started on the analysis of knowledge transaction characteristics, and proposed a "two-dimension" hypothesis, proving that knowledge transactions with different characteristics should employ different transaction governance structures. Based on the above discussion, this paper built up a mathematic model to analyze the relationship among supply chain alliance, firm, and market, and to discuss the endogenetic decision of scale boundary. What's more, taking into consideration that the situation was greatly changed in new-economy, this paper modified the model and adjusted the relationships of the variables and arrived at some valuable conclusions.This paper is composed with 6 parts. The first part is a literature review, including the development and evolvement of transaction governance theory, the theory of the competence of the firm, the theory of the core competence of the firm and firm alliance theory, and this part also includes a brief critique concerning the limitation.The point that supply chain alliance is a kind of governance structure of knowledge trade is proved in the second part. Hereby the writer points out that firms build up the "inter-firm level" knowledge division system, or named knowledge transaction governance structure, in the way of building a supply chain alliance, because of the heterogeneity of the knowledge resource among different firms. Besides, this part also analyzes the respective features and differences of markets firm and middle-organization including supply chain alliance.The third part illustrates the "two-dimension" hypothesis, showing that the two-dimension vector consisted by the distinction level and transmissibility level of apiece of knowledge can denote the characteristic of this knowledge transaction. Furthermore, this part also proves the corresponding relationship between the transaction governance structure and knowledge transaction characteristics.A mathematic model is set up in the fourth part to discuss the scale boundary issue of supply chain alliance. Based on the "two-dimension" hypothesis about knowledge trade, the model calculates the equilibrium condition and scale boundary decision condition and furthermore puts the obtained results into the firms' participant constraint to testify them, in the way of analyzing the "two-dimension" vectors delegating the distinction level and transmissibility level of the transacted knowledge within the alliance.The model is revised and extended according to the new-economy situation in the fifth part. In this part, the writer analyzes the features of new-economy and proposes that the demand situation, firms' cost structure and the characteristics of knowledge trade have changed evidently. All the changes can affect the relationships among the variables in the model, therefore the writer modifies the model. As a conclusion, the paper points out that a tendency that supply chain alliance expands its scale boundary is emerging.The sixth part is involved in some issues about the building of supply chain alliance in China and some policy suggestions. The writer points out that Chinese current developing pattern of "small and all-around big and all-around", market isolation, credit crisis and other alike economic situation are putting hardness and obstacle in the building of supply chain alliance. Taking all the factors above mentioned into consideration, the writer proposes some relative policy suggestions.