We are happy to announce that Carolin Häussler, Marvin Hanisch from the Chair together with Lorenz Graf-Vlachy and Andreas König (both University of Passau) and Theresa Cho (Seoul National University) received the Best Paper Award of the Strategic Management Behavioral Strategy Track at this year’s EURAM. The title of the paper is “Kindred spirits: The Influence of Cognitive Frame Similarity on Contingency Planning in Strategic Alliances”
The study works towards better understanding the antecedents of contract design. It highlights that, alliance partners frequently include relational “good faith” provisions in contracts rather than explicit contingency provisions, thereby shifting decisions about how to deal with contingencies to the future. In this paper, the authors draw from the socio-cognitive perspective to study when and why partners prefer good faith provisions in alliance contracts. Specifically, the concept of cognitive frame similarity is introduced and it is suggested that partners with greater similarity in their organization-level cognitive frames are more likely to use good faith provisions. This is because partners with higher cognitive frame similarity are more likely to expect their interpretations of future contingencies to be congruent, ultimately reducing the presumed benefits of explicit contingency planning. In the study, it is also argued that the relationship between partners’ cognitive frame similarity and their use of good faith provisions in contracts is strengthened by technological uncertainty and weakened by contracting experience. The theory is tested with a unique dataset of 843 alliances in the bio-pharmaceutical industry. The results corroborate the theory, thereby highlighting the importance of cognitive frames in interorganizational relationships and providing a novel perspective on strategic alliances and contract design.