| A growing number of alliances are made between competing firms which cooperate in fieds where they normally should be bitter rivals. The economics and business strategy literature enables one to interpret the ambiguous relation between cooperation and competition, but the existing empirical studies which are based upon descriptive data bases on alliances, provide little understanding of this issue. This paper is an original empirical research trying to fill this gap. Its distinctive feature is to take into account the assets and the capabilities contributed by each allied firm, on a symmetrical or a dissymmetrical basis. Then, this characteristics are correlated with more classical variables (geographical zones, industries, types of partnership, etc.). The statistical processing of the data leads to a " chart " of alliances which identifies the different types of competition/cooperation links that appear between the allies. |
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