Business

Investment (military)

Scope (computer science)

Economies of scale

Biology

Politics

Political science

Economics

Microeconomics

Set (abstract data type)

Ecology

Programming language

Economies of scope

Alliance

Incentive

Computer science

Industrial organization

Competition (biology)

Strategic Management Journal

We show how the tension between cooperation and competition affects the dynamics of learning alliances. ‘Private benefits’ and ‘common benefits’ differ in the incentives that they create for investment in learning. The competitive aspects of alliances are most severe when a firm's ratio of private to common benefits is high. We introduce a measure, ‘relative scope’ of a firm in an alliance, to show that the opportunity set of each firm outside an alliance crucially impacts its behavior within the alliance. Finally, we suggest why firms might deviate from the theoretically optimal behavior patterns. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The dynamics of learning alliances: competition, cooperation, and relative scope