TRANSFERABILITY OF PARTNERING EXPERIENCES ACROSS NETWORKS : THE IMPACT OF M&A ADVISORY TIES ON THE FORMATION OF PUBLIC OFFERING SYNDICATES

Most previous studies on partner selection have overlooked the phenomenon where organizations make partnering decisions in one network on the basis of their relationships with partners in another network. We combine insights from the attention-based view of the firm with insights from resource dependence theory to explicate the conditions under which the probability of two organizations' partnering in one (focal) network will be influenced by the existence of a direct relationship between them in a different (parallel) network. Specifically, we argue that the transferability of a tie from the parallel network to the focal network is affected by the attention that managers give to the parallel network as a whole or to the specific partners in that network. In turn, this attention is influenced by the degree of dependence that the organization has on the parallel network as a whole or on individual partners in that network. Our analyses of a dataset consisting of information on the participation of US investment banks in public offerings syndicates, and M&A advisory teams between 1980 and 2001 support these arguments.