A multiobjective programming model for partner selection-perspectives of objective synergies and resource allocations

Strategic alliances are widely used in business to obtain the synergy effect and competitive advantage. On the basis of the resource-based view, it can be seen that the valuable resources of firms provide the motivation for entering into strategic alliances. Therefore, the issue of partner selection plays a critical role in the performance of strategic alliances. Although many mathematical programming models have been proposed to deal with the partner selection problems, two main issues such as objective synergies and resource allocations are seems to be ignored. In this paper, a new multiobjective programming model is proposed to determine the optimal partners in the alliance and the corresponding resource allocations. Furthermore, a numerical example is used to demonstrate the proposed method and compared with the conventional method. From the results, it can be concluded that objective synergies and resource allocations play a significant role in the problem of partner selection and should not be ignored in the realistic alliance's problems. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.