پرتفوی های ائتلاف و ارزش سهام در شرکت های پست IPO: نقش های تعدیل ساختار پرتفوی و عدم اطمینان در سطح بنگاه

Using longitudinal data for initial public offering (IPO) firms, we examine the role played by structural differences between different types of alliance portfolios in the relationship between IPO firm alliance portfolios and shareholder returns. We show that because of the different signals they send to the capital market, different types of alliance portfolios affect IPO firm performance differently. Namely, financial markets seem to reward firms whose alliance portfolio is diversified across different types of alliances (a portfolio high in functional diversity), but not those who align their alliance partners into multiple functional points in the value chain (a portfolio high in vertical scope). We also examine the signaling role of alliance portfolios under different IPO firm uncertainty conditions. We note that uncertainty about the IPO firm is not limited to pre-IPO quality uncertainty. Investors also face transition uncertainty, post-IPO uncertainty about the ability of the firm to adapt to the new managerial challenges it faces and succeed post-IPO. We find that these two types of uncertainties moderate alliance portfolio effects in different ways. The beneficial effects of alliance portfolios in mitigating liabilities of newness is of greater importance for firms associated with higher quality uncertainty and for those associated with lower transition uncertainty.

In place of the prevalent dyadic and industry network approach, researchers have recently proposed a portfolio view to studying strategic alliances (Hoffmann, 2007 and Vassolo et al., 2004). Instead of atomistic studies of individual alliances, or of holistic studies of industry players' relative structural positions within networks, the study of alliance portfolios shifts the analysis to an intermediate level by focusing on an individual firm's collection of immediate alliance relationships (Lavie and Miller, 2008). Considering the portfolio as a unit of analysis “eschews the reductionism that occurs when an analyzed pair of firms is abstracted out of their embedded context” (Sarkar et al., 2009), while enabling the study of issues that emerge from the management of multiple simultaneous alliances with different partners (Wassmer, 2010). However, “accumulated alliance research offers only limited insights into the phenomenon” (Lavie, 2007). Moving this body of work forward, we investigate the following research questions: How is the value of a firm's alliance portfolio, as perceived by the capital market, influenced by portfolio structure and uncertainty concerning firm capabilities? We examine our research questions in the context of firms that have recently undergone their initial public offerings. Considered to be threshold companies (Zahra et al., 2009), such firms go through a major transition in their organizational lifecycle during the IPO process. While this transition phase confirms that these firms have successfully overcome the early challenges of their existence, moving to the next stage of the organizational lifecycle also raises new challenges in governance capabilities as these firms learn to operate in the spotlight of analysts and public investors (Zahra and Filatotchev, 2004). While a lot more information is publicly available post IPO, research indicates that residual uncertainty due to information asymmetry continues to exist between the firm and the investor community (Certo, 2003, Ibbotson et al., 1988 and Rock, 1986). In this context, signaling theory suggests that certain visible manifestations of strategic behavior such as alliances would provide clues to the investor community about the capabilities of the firm (Deeds et al., 1997), thus impacting performance (Sanders and Boivie, 2004). In investigating alliance portfolios through the lens of signaling theory, we depart from previous research in one important way: while literature shows that alliances can serve as signals that can mitigate newness related liabilities (Stuart et al., 1999), our main premise is that the structure of the alliance portfolio and threshold firm characteristics also serve as signals communicating strengths and vulnerabilities to the capital market, thereby affecting valuation. In anticipation, we begin by investigating how certain structural characteristics of a firm's alliance portfolio serve as signaling mechanisms to influence the relationship between alliances and shareholder returns. We find that shareholder returns are lower for firms whose alliance portfolios are characterized by higher levels of vertical scope, thus supporting our logic that capital markets are particularly concerned about the appropriation risks that are inevitably associated with increased portfolio vertical scope (Gulati and Singh, 1998) over and above the efficiency rewards that such structures may bring. Conversely, we find that shareholder returns are higher for firms with alliance portfolios characterized by higher levels of functional diversity — which serves as an indication that capital markets are particularly receptive to signals indicative of alliance portfolios spanning the exploration–exploitation continuum. We then investigate how the context of the firm itself influences the value perception of its alliance portfolios. In line with the view that uncertainty is multidimensional (Milliken, 1987) and that “different types of market uncertainty focus investor attention on different sets of factors” (Gulati and Higgins, 2003), we examine the role of alliance portfolios under different uncertainty conditions facing the IPO firm. We suggest that in addition to quality uncertainty, that is, pre-IPO uncertainty related to the intrinsic ‘quality’ of the firm and its readiness to go public, IPO firms also face transition uncertainty, or post-IPO uncertainty about the ability of the firm to adapt and succeed in the face of new managerial and governance challenges that arise after a firm goes public. Our findings indicate that the value of alliance portfolios vary across different types of uncertainty relating to firm capabilities. Since alliances serve as endorsements which legitimize and ratify the firm's value, they are perceived to be even more valuable to firms which suffer from greater quality uncertainty. On the other hand, alliances are perceived to be of greater value to firms associated with lower transition uncertainty since these firms are perceived by the capital market as possessing the requisite corporate governance capabilities required to manage their transformation into public firms and thereby capitalize on the resources that their alliance portfolios bring with them. Overall, our results indicate that the perceived value of an alliance portfolio is contingent on its structure, as well as on the perceived capabilities of the firm.

While the effects of inter-firm relationships on firm performance have been the focus of a flourishing stream of research, less attention has been paid to how the structure of an alliance portfolio, alongside uncertainty surrounding a firm's capabilities influence the perceived value of an alliance network. We study these questions in the context of ‘threshold’ firms that are undergoing transition in their organizational lifecycle (Daily and Dalton, 1992 and Zahra and Filatotchev, 2004), and in the process, core transformations that subject them to renewed liabilities of newness (Jain and Kini, 1999 and Welbourne and Andrews, 1996). Specifically, we adopt a signaling perspective and study how a portfolio's structure (content and scope), and uncertainty (quality and transition) surrounding a firm's capabilities condition the value of its alliance network as perceived by the capital market. Our baseline hypothesis predicts and confirms a positive main effect between the size of the alliance portfolio and performance measured by shareholder returns (Hypothesis 1). Networks therefore appear to have a mitigating effect on the various liabilities that firms in transition may experience through signaling legitimacy and potential future returns. Moving on, we study how two structural characteristics of alliance portfolios, namely vertical scope and functional diversity, condition the portfolio's value (H2 and H3), and how uncertainty surrounding the firm's intrinsic capabilities on one hand and its ability to manage the transition from a private firm to a cash-infused public entity on the other impinge on the value of the portfolio (H4 and H5). In brief, our results indicate that not all portfolios are valued equally. Shareholder returns are lower for firms whose alliance portfolios are structured in a way that increases their vertical scope, but higher for firms with more functionally diversified alliance portfolios. Returns are also higher for firms that have greater degrees of quality related uncertainty associated with them, but lower for those that carry doubts about whether they possess the requisite governance capabilities to manage the transition successfully. With regard to the first finding, our results demonstrate that the perceived downsides of knowledge appropriation far outweigh the benefits in reduced coordination costs that arise from increased vertical scope. While leveraging partners into multiple links along the value chain may bring in efficiencies in coordination costs (Bakos and Brynjolfsson, 1999), the greater degree of knowledge sharing entailed in alliances with greater scope renders young firms vulnerable to knowledge appropriation (Oxley and Sampson, 2004). With entrepreneurial firms' most critical resource typically being knowledge (Alvarez and Barney, 2004 and Alvarez and Busenitz, 2001), capital markets are likely to be wary of vulnerabilities brought about by the potential of unintended knowledge spillovers. In the face of information asymmetry, such appropriation concerns are likely to be heightened thus rendering threshold companies particularly vulnerable. With regard to the content-related structure of a portfolio, we show that markets bestow a premium on those that are more diverse. We had theorized multiple mechanisms why this may be so, including the value attached to being ambidextrous and being able to balance value exploration with exploitation oriented alliances, lack of redundancy and concomitant access to a wider pool of resources, and the flexibility firms can derive from access to diverse options. Results demonstrate that capital markets are particularly receptive to indicators signaling firm strategies that are designed to simultaneously create new knowledge while appropriating value from existing resources. Consistent with the perspective that uncertainty is multidimensional (Gulati and Higgins, 2003 and Milliken, 1987), we examine the role of alliance portfolios under different types of endogenous uncertainty facing threshold firms. We propose that such firms face uncertainty not only about their intrinsic capabilities, but also about their ability to manage the multifarious challenges of growing while transitioning from a privately held company to a publicly listed one. While the former relates to investors' doubts about the intrinsic ‘quality’ of the firm and its readiness to go public, post-IPO uncertainty relates to the ability of the firm to adapt to the new managerial challenges it faces and succeed after it goes public. We predict and find that the effect on the relationship between alliance portfolios and shareholder value differs by the type of such uncertainty. For firms associated with quality uncertainty, networks serve as endorsements which legitimize and ratify the firm's value. On the other hand, alliance portfolios are of greater value to firms associated with lower transition uncertainty since these are perceived by the market as having the corporate governance capabilities required to capitalize on their alliance portfolios. The present study extends prior research on strategic alliances and entrepreneurship in two major ways. First, while traditional alliance research has predominantly focused on single alliances, various alliance researchers have highlighted the need to analyze alliance portfolios and the important issues associated with them (Wassmer, 2010 and Lavie, 2006). We extend this emerging stream of research through the lens of signaling theory and suggest that the value creating potential of networks is contingent upon the structural characteristics of the firm's portfolio, investor perceptions of the intrinsic quality of the firm, as well as perceptions of how the firm is able to professionalize its corporate governance to effectively transition into a complex organization that can appropriate value from alliances. Second, we extend nascent research exploring the uncertainty subsequent to the IPO. While the literature has examined the level of pre-IPO uncertainty over the true value of the firm and the associated information asymmetry between informed and uniformed investors (Beatty and Ritter, 1986, Corwin and Harris, 2001, Habib and Ljungqvist, 2001 and Ritter, 1984), recent studies suggest that the degree of uncertainty and informational asymmetry among investors is not completely resolved at the time of IPO. Chen and Wilhelm (2008) note that in addition to pre-IPO uncertainty, “ex post value uncertainty” and associated asymmetric information persist in the IPO aftermarket. Other studies in the finance literature also suggest that uncertainty surrounding the firm continues after the IPO. Ellul and Pagano (2006) examine the relationship between underpricing and aftermarket uncertainty, and Corwin et al. (2004) examine aftermarket liquidity and associated uncertainties subsequent to the IPO. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to explore the role of post-IPO transition uncertainty in the relationship between alliance portfolios and firm performance. One potential shortcoming of this research is that we assume homogeneity in partner quality. Some research argues that partner quality may lead to differences in network performance (Stuart, 2000). In other words, it is not only the structure of the alliance portfolio that would play a role in the relationship between portfolio size and performance, but also the ‘quality’ of the partners comprising the portfolio. One avenue for future research would be to examine the combined effects of portfolio arrangement and partner quality on performance. Along the same lines, future research could extend the present study by considering the “content of information” flowing across different partners in the alliance portfolio. Gulati and Higgins (2003) observe that interorganizational research tends to focus on the structure of relationships between actors at the expense of examining the content of information flow between actors. Future research could examine the interactions between alliance portfolio structure and the resources streaming among the portfolio actors. These interactions could potentially effect investor perceptions, and thus, IPO firm performance. Further, our results are valid to the extent that the measures used, i.e., sales and VC-backing, are suitable proxies for quality and transition uncertainty respectively. While we feel that both measures are appropriate, more direct measures (e.g., a more direct measure of firm management quality as a proxy for transition uncertainty) could lead to further insights into the relationships studied. In spite of our best efforts, our study may also be subject to a limitation that plagues much of entrepreneurship and strategy research, namely endogeneity concerns. In other words, it is possible that firms with the greatest inherent value at the pre-IPO stage (due to their being able to develop great products or technology) attract the most alliances, investors, and VCs. Therefore, the post-IPO relationship of all of these variables could be fortuitous, all driven by the fact that the core start-up was highly profitable or had very high potential. Since we cannot completely rule this out, it would be profitable for future research to understand a fundamental question that underlies this conundrum: do the best start-up ideas get picked up by VCs, and alliance partners? We also do not account for differences in firm ability to generate value from their alliance portfolios. Sarkar et al. (2009) find evidence of heterogeneity among firms in deriving value from alliance portfolios through an alliance capability emanating from organizational processes. In other words, some firms are better able to create and capture value through their alliances than others. Future research that considers alliance portfolio structure as well as firm capabilities in appropriating value from their alliance portfolios would lend further insight into the relationship between alliance portfolios and firm performance. Finally, our study is limited by its focus on a single industry. Focusing on the manufacturing industry allows us to study an industry that witnessed a burgeoning of alliances in the last decade as well as control for industry heterogeneity. This, however, constrains our ability to generalize our findings since the results might reflect factors idiosyncratic to the industry.