The Decision to Persist with Underperforming Alliances: The Role of Trust and Control

We draw on theories of persistence to develop a model of alliance managers' decisions towards persisting in underperforming alliances based on their concomitant consideration of the control and trust in those alliances. We test the model using experimental data based on 2,816 decisions nested within 88 alliance managers. We find that output, behavioural and social control, competence and goodwill trust, and interactions between trust and control variables significantly explain alliance managers' decisions to persist in underperforming alliances. We discuss the implications of these findings for the control, trust and strategic alliance literatures.