臺大管理論叢 NTU Management Review VOL.29 NO.1

Choose Foreign R&D Partners From Right Pools: A Synthesis Framework 108 establishing a stable structure that facilitates interactions (Hoskisson, Eden, Lau, and Wright, 2000). However, the institutional environments of some host countries, especially in the emerging economies, are poorly structured and malfunctioning; Khanna and Palepu (1997) coins the term “institutional voids” for such institutional failures, that refers to the relative lack of intermediary firms, regulatory systems and contract-enforcing mechanisms. Those voids will hamper the economic exchanges in the capital, labor and product markets. Collaboration is a kind of arms-length transactions, and the appropriate governance is the key success factor from the perspective of transactional costs economics. Institutional voids of the host countries impose higher risks of opportunistic hazards on firms. Information asymmetry, interest misalignment and asset specificity are the key antecedents of opportunism. For the exploitative collaboration, information asymmetry and interest misalignment become the focal firm’s concerns on its partners when the regulatory enforcement for protecting the value appropriation is lacking. For the exploratory collaboration, the asset specificity and the interest misalignment will jeopardize the relationships between the focal firm and its partners. When the target host country is full of institutional voids, the contextual uncertainty increases risks to the focal firm. Miller and Blair (2009) claim that the regional, national and international connections with suppliers, business partners, and customers will encounter the risks inherent in the political and economic conditions locally. Upon entry to such a host country, the focal firm’s idiosyncratic knowledge or economic rents may likely be expropriated by the local collaborators because of the lack of regulative protections on property rights or contract enforcement. Institutional voids increase the transactional hazards that are derived from the information asymmetry due to the lack of qualified information intermediaries; the risk of adverse selection thus increases. As such, we argue that the focal firm’s willingness to collaborate with its internal stakeholders for the exploitative learning will be intensified but the willingness to collaborate with its external stakeholders for the exploratory learning will be weakened. The ongoing business relationships and the good interest alignments between the focal firm and its internal stakeholders will mitigate the opportunism under institutional voids; however, the external stakeholders, lacking interest alignments with the focal firm and being more obliged to follow the governmental policies, may be unlikely to provide much help to the focal firm in avoiding risks from the institutional voids, though they might not behave opportunistically. For example, Khanna and Palepu (2000) argue that, in the emerging