Empirical Study on Choices between M&A and Strategic Alliance

Both M&A and strategic alliance are firm´s external development strategies. They possess common characters, but they also have differences. According to statistics, success rate of them are lower than firm´s expectation. Firm usually chooses strategic alliance while M&A is the best choice, vice versa. The main reason is lacking of decision reference. This paper compares M&A activities with strategic alliance activities based on the transaction cost theory and resource-based theory. And then find out several influential variables according to hypotheses we concluded. Finally, according to the data settled from professional database, we conclude decision models by means of self organization map (SOM) neural network method and stepwise multivariate linear regression method. The model will be a decision reference for firm´s decision maker