‘Will you act like we have never kissed’ : The impact of strategic alliances on subsequent competitions.

While prior studies have examined the impact of strategic alliances on future collaborations, this research contributes to the alliance literature by studying the impact of alliances on firms’ subsequent competitions. Specifically, we integrate alliance learning and social network perspectives to examine, at the dyadic level, how exploratory versus exploitative collaborations between alliance firms drive their subsequent competitions in product markets. We further investigate the moderating effects of firms’ embeddedness in alliance networks, namely their relational embeddedness (i.e., repeated interactions) and positional embeddedness (i.e., relative centrality). We test our theory using a unique dataset that integrates information on alliances and competitive actions in the U.S. biopharmaceutical industry over two decades (1981-2003).