Alliance Formation and Firm Value

We consider the formation of alliances that potentially create complementarities, that is, when the value function is supermodular in firm resources. We show that, in a frictionless world where information is perfect and managers optimize, firm alliances disproportionately increase the value of high-resource-level firms, resulting in higher variance and higher skewness of the distribution of firm value; moreover, higher-value alliances are subject to regression to the mean at a faster rate. These effects are magnified if the degree of complementarities is endogenously determined by each firm’s investment. We also consider alliances where matching and/or information about firm resources are imperfect, and show that complementarities are a necessary but not sufficient condition for alliances to cause an increase in firm value; and that complementarities are neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for alliances to be correlated with higher firm value. This paper was accepted by Olav Sorenson, organizations.