Choosing Between Safeguards: Scope and Governance Decisions in R&D Alliances

Research on transaction cost economics has emphasized the choice of an appropriate governance structure as an important mechanism in alleviating exchange hazards in interfirm transactions, yet firms may also manipulate the characteristics of a transaction to make it less hazardous in the first place by carefully selecting the activities or assets involved in the transaction. In this paper, we explore this theoretical issue in transaction cost...