SOLVING THE ALLY-VERSUS-ACQUIRE DILEMMA THROUGH THE DUAL LENSES OF SUBJECTIVE AND OBJECTIVE VIEWS

Nowadays many firms seek hard-to-imitate assets via allying with or acquiring other firms that own desired resources. As such, how to choose between alliances and acquisitions becomes a critical decision, and one important determinant is interfirm factors. This study probes three crucial yet underexplored interfirm differences, and develops scales to capture managers’ perceptions of the differences that, based on managerial cognition literature,...