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Pursuiting business goals with alliances is more risky than a single firm doing it alone. [40] One of the risk factors in strategic alliances is the appearance of opportunistic behavior. Williamson defined opportunism as ‘‘self-interest seeking with guile’’. [41] This definition of opportunism, as applied to alliances, has five major components: behavior, motives, self-interest seeking, deceit, and gains at the expense of others. [42] Das and Rahman (2001) claim that being opportunistic in the context of strategic alliances means that one of the actors could break his promises, stop sharing resources or facilities as per agreement, bluff, lie, mislead, misrepresent, distort, cheat, misappropriate, steal, etc. [43] They define partner opportunism in a more extended form as motivation of the partner to pursue its self-interest with deceit to achieve its goals harming other alliance members. [44]

Many scholars like Klein, Master and Williamson present two main determinants of opportunism that are economic and relational opportunism. In short, economic opportunism manifest when an alliance partner is driven by the goal to acquire economic benefits or to avoid economic losses. That is to say that in furtherance of its own economic self-interest, an alliance partner may harm other alliance partners. An opportunistic alliance partner would be even more driven toward opportunism, the more potential economic gains are higher. [45] Relational opportunism manifest when alliance firms from different or even the same country have very different organizational cultures. [46] Hence, such firms see the strategic behavior of their partners in different way, which may cause problems in the alliance. For instance, if they have distinctive organizational cultures, they are likely to interpret and respond differently to the same strategic issue. [47]

Furthermore, there are many reasons to incentive opportunistic behavior. Wathe and Heide (2000) have recently offered a framework of four forms of opportunism, which are evasion, refusal to adapt, violation, and forced renegotiation. However, according to Sako and Helper (1998) the focal firm would be vulnerable to opportunism if there are customer-specific assets, lack of reciprocity, and uncertain market and technology environments [48] , while Provan and Skinner (1989) find dependence and control of decision making as antecedents of opportunism. [49] What is more, Joshi and Stump (1999) used only technological unpredictability as a determinant of opportunism. [50] In addition, Wathne and Heide (2000) note that the supplier's perception of opportunism would be higher under conditions of information asymmetry. [51] Finally, John claims that an alliance partner would be more likely to act opportunistically if it felt constrained by another alliance member. [52] In that case, the levels of trust and commitment between partners would change significantly negative. If one alliance member behaves opportunistic, the other members would perceive that kind of behavior as unwilling to cooperate and contr本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。