ESTT members contributed to the Strategic Management Society (SMS) Annual Conference in Paris. They presented the following paper:

Bound to Last? Alliance Persistence in the Presence of Alternative Partnering Options, N. Hampl, W. H. Hoffmann, T. Knoll

Only recently research has begun to depart from a failure-driven perspective to explain alliance dissolution, to also incorporate contextual changes. We build upon the nascent stream of option-driven alliance termination and experimentally examine whether decision makers are prone to substitute existing alliance partners by alternative ones, which we define as ‘partner switch’. The preliminary results of our study show that while executives do consider outside options to existing alliances, the presence of both relational embeddedness with existing partners and prior partner-specific investments constitute substantial social and economic barriers to partner switching. In addition, we found that if decision makers are operating in uncertain industries, the barriers to partner switch are significantly moderated.