Study On Governance Mechanism Of Interorganizational Opportunism

The concept of opportunism first appeared in the transaction cost theory of Williamson, in previous study, one party's opportunism behavior is due to another party's specific investment. And opportunism was just seen as the key to judge the efficiency of alternative governance mechanism. Although opportunism resulting from information asymmetry was considered in some research, it was either a description study or studied in the mathematical model. In this paper, we studied opportunism resulting from information asymmetry with empirical method.On the basis of transaction cost economics and agency theory; we divide opportunism into ex ante and ex post opportunism. Besides, we regard incentive mechanism as the most effective mechanism to defend opportunism resulting from information asymmetry, because incentive makes the relationship aligned in long-term interest, it makes the inspired party self-enforced. From the buyers' point of view, we select price premium, reputation and seller's TSI as variances of incentive mechanism, because they can make sellers self-discipline. We analysis their influences on ex ante and ex post opportunism, and take buyers'specified investment and network embeddedness as moderate variables.In the empirical study, we choose computer assembly business in Dalian as our research setting. In the process of scale development, the scale of ex ante opportunism and ex post opportunism are on the basis of expert interview and adjustment of current scales, the other scales are current scales in foreign literature, we make some change according to our circumstances. We give out 260 questionnaires and receive 240, then get rid of the invalid questionnaires, we have 224 valid questionnaires. Then we check the reliability and validity of the data, after that, we do the correlation and regression analysis, the results indicate that most hypothesis are verified.The result indicated that price premium has a negative influence on ex post opportunism; reputation has a negative influence on both ex ante and ex post opportunism; seller's TSI has negative influence on both ex ante and ex post opportunism; buy's TSI strengthen the negative impact of seller's transaction specific investment on ex post opportunism,but weaken the negative impact of price premium on ex post opportunism, all these two results are opposite with the original hypothesises; reputation and seller's TSI have negative impact on price premium.