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International joint ventures (IJVs) are an important type of international strategic alliance (ISA) and have been studied by scholars for decades, resulting in a plethora of empirical studies, publications, and reviews, yet an inadequate accumulation of knowledge exists, as a closer look reveals. Much more than providing a summary and critical assessment of past contributions, this paper develops an expansive research agenda based upon a deep understanding of past research and comprehensive frameworks that distill this research. We identify a number of research opportunities that would not only advance IJV research but also closely related literatures and disciplines such as ISAs, theories of the multinational firm, international business research, and strategic management.

Partner selection is a critical issue in building international joint ventures (IJVs). We argue that foreign firms are more likely to select local firms with unique network structural advantages within a local alliance network. We frame structural advantages as two network position traits: centrality and brokerage. Specifically, network centrality acts as a stronger network trait than brokerage in attracting foreign IJV partners. However, such a relationship may be moderated by foreign firms' local experience and perceived capabilities. We contend that when foreign firms have a high level of local market experience and perceived capabilities, they may prefer a local broker over a centrally located local firm. Data on the domestic alliance network in China's electronics and information technology (IT) industries largely support our hypotheses. We conclude that as foreign investors become strategic insiders, they may not only seek a local partner's capability attributes, but also more critically pay attention to a local partner's domestic network.

Extending the literature on institutional voids, we introduce theory from law that highlights the ability of firms to choose the laws and enforcement mechanisms that govern their international joint ventures (IJVs). Specifically, firms may overcome institutional voids by borrowing institutions via binding international commercial arbitration (BICA) rather than relying on host-market institutions. Leveraging an institution-based view, we develop a theoretical framework to articulate the conditions under which IJV partners may choose BICA as opposed to domestic courts to overcome institutional voids in host markets.

Notwithstanding their popularity, veto rights are inadequately understood features of international agreements, particularly interfirm exchanges such as international joint ventures (IJVs). As an interesting feature of an IJV’s governance design, they shape decision-making of the most powerful administrative mechanism of an IJV – the IJV board. IJVs’ boards play a crucial part in supporting adaptation to contingencies, but their adaptive capacity can also give rise to a different set of concerns, however: their opportunistic use by a partner in control of the board. Such behavior, we argue, can be reined in by veto rights. Building on transaction cost economics, we posit that goal conflicts owing to partner competition and environmental uncertainty contribute to the allocation of veto rights to partners. Concerns surrounding the maladaptive use of board control weaken when institutional safeguards are strong, reducing the need for veto rights. Findings from a survey of IJVs furnish evidence in support of the core proposition that veto rights can help parent firms address maladaptation. We conclude that veto rights can be an important element of partners’ arsenal when designing and governing IJVs based on comparative efficiency considerations.

Forming international joint ventures (IJVs) with political institutions in emerging economies involves both benefits and risks for multinational enterprises (MNEs). While political partners can provide IJVs with various resources, their political status equips them with a strong position to appropriate rents in IJVs. We address this tension by examining how host state ownership affects both innovation inputs and outputs in China-based IJVs over 2008–2013. Despite the potential government opportunism, we find more R&D investment (innovation inputs) made in IJVs with state partners than in those with private ones. Thus, R&D investment can be politically motivated and symbolically managed to ensure continued resource exchanges with the host state. This political pressure is mitigated when foreign parents directly transfer home-country-based technology to IJVs, when the host-market dependence of IJV is weak, and when IJVs are located in a deregulated region. Moreover, we find foreign-host-state JVs deliver fewer innovation outputs (measured by patent data) than foreign-private JVs, which implies the failure of state partners to adequately absorb foreign technologies. These findings highlight both the state partners’ powerfulness to boost IJV innovation investment and their limits in shaping IJV innovation outcomes, and bear rich implications for the management of MNE–host government relationships.

Research summary: This article provides a review of real options theory (ROT) in strategic management research. We review the fundamentals of ROT and provide a taxonomy of this research. By synthesizing and critiquing research on real options, we identify a number of important challenges as well as opportunities for ROT if it is to enhance its impact on strategic management and potentially develop into a theoretical pillar in the field. We examine how ROT can inform the key tensions that managers face between commitment versus flexibility as well as between competition versus cooperation, and we show how it can uniquely address the fundamental issues in strategy. We conclude with suggestions on future research directions that could enhance and unify the thus-far distinct main approaches to real options research. Managerial summary: Real options theory (ROT) applies the heuristics and valuation models originally designed for financial securities to the domain of corporate investment decisions (e.g., joint ventures [JVs], foreign direct investment, research and development [R&D], etc.) and strategic decision making under uncertainty. This article provides a synthesis of this body of research in strategic management and related disciplines. We suggest how ROT can address fundamental issues of strategy, including the dilemmas managers face between commitment versus flexibility as well as between competition versus cooperation. We discuss how three distinct approaches to real options analysis can complement each other, and we identify some of the main challenges and opportunities for ROT to become a theoretical pillar in strategy.

In this paper, we examine how one important type of relationship, research joint ventures (RJVs), is governed within the context of an entrepreneurial ecosystem. Based on agency theory, we investigate the relationship between the governance structure of an RJV and the likelihood that the venture will embrace elements of its research-based ecosystem, that is, the likelihood that the RJV will invite a university to become a research member of the venture. Using data from the National Research Joint Venture Database, we find that when the governance structure of the RJV affords the organizer/leader and research director (the principal) the ability to exert control over the activities of the other members of the RJV (the agents), universities are less likely to be invited to participate as a research member.

This study explores when wholly owned subsidiaries outperform joint ventures with local partners. In order to avoid the endogeneity problem inherent in foreign subsidiaries' operating mode decisions that might confound performance measurement, we employ the propensity score matching method, along with the difference-in-differences approach, and compare the performances of joint ventures turned wholly owned subsidiaries vis-à-vis continuing joint ventures. Based on foreign subsidiaries' financial data in China for 1998—2006, we find strong evidence that converted wholly owned subsidiaries outperform continuing joint ventures in industries characterized by high levels of intangible assets such as technology or brand, after controlling for factors that may affect the conversion decision. This finding is consistent with the prediction of transaction cost theory.

How does government coordination in the strategic sectors affect the impact of relational resources on firm intellectual property (IP) development in the emerging economies? We investigate this question in the Chinese high-speed train sector from 1993 to 2014. Contrary to prior findings that international joint ventures (IJVs) lead technological innovation in the emerging economies, IJVs underperform in IP development in this context, whereas government-affiliated domestic firms outperform. We argue that government coordination in the strategic sector has escalated cross-border competitive tension but facilitated domestic collaborative innovation. Hence, IJVs face relational liabilities that hinder IP breakthrough, whereas government-affiliated domestic firms can leverage relational assets for innovation. We further examine the effects of ego-network density in the innovation network, which captures the degree to which a firm relies on partners to innovate. Consistent with our theory, innovation network density hampers IP development for the IJVs but promotes that for the government-affiliated domestic firms. Our findings offer actionable insights for innovation managers and policymakers in the strategic sectors. Firm managers should consider the potential influences from government coordination when acquiring relational resources for innovation. Policymakers should keep in mind how government actions may influence both interfirm collaboration and competition when building innovation networks.

We adopt a resource dependence approach to explain the effect of state participation on the dissolution of international joint ventures (IJVs). While resource dependence theory (RDT) has been used to explain the formation of lJVs, we propose an extension of the theory to explain their dissolution. We do so by highlighting the match between foreign firms' resource needs (resource hierarchy) and the resource provision roles of state-controlled vs private local partners (resource profiles). We further argue that the effect of state participation on the dissolution of IJVs is moderated by foreign firms' host country experience and IJV age. We test our hypotheses by using data on 623 IJVs in China. Our results show that state participation reduces the risk of IJV dissolution and that the strength of this effect differs depending on the type of state-controlled actor that is involved in an IJV. We also find that host country experience and IJV age moderate the effect of state participation on IJV dissolution. These findings enhance our understanding of IJV dissolution and contribute to the development of RDT.