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The transfer of knowledge in alliances entails risk to partners, whose willingness to accept it presumably relies on the trustworthiness that they perceive in their partners. We investigate the extent to which the perceptions of trustworthiness and the willingness to take risk determine the transfer of knowledge between alliance partners and their ultimate impact on alliance success. The results show that the transfer of tacit versus explicit knowledge have very different trust and risk profiles. Whereas explicit knowledge is closely associated with the firm's willingness to take risk, tacit knowledge is intimately related to high trustworthiness. The results support the important role of trust and the transfer of tacit knowledge on the success of learning alliances. Copyright (c) Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2008.

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This paper investigates the antecedents of intraorganizational trust and, more specifically, how the frequency of communication between trustor and trustee moderates the impact of these factors on perceived trustworthiness. Data on 157 dyadic relationships among 50 senior managers within a multinational corporation confirm that the effect of both trustor, as well as trustee characteristics on the level of perceived trustworthiness, is moderated by the frequency of communication between the two parties. As communication frequency increases, the trustor's general attitudinal predisposition towards peers becomes less important as a determinant of his/her evaluation of trustworthiness of other managers within the organization. In contrast, as communication frequency increases, the trustor's and trustee's contexts within the organization become more important determinants of perceived trustworthiness. (Trust; Trustworthiness; Communication)

In this study, we show that the effect of diversification on performance is not homogeneous across industries and explore analytically and empirically the implications of this finding for the diversification literature. Diversified firms perform better in industries with a small number of nondiversified competitors or, equivalently, when specialized firms have a small combined market share, but worse as the presence of specialized firms increases in the industries in which they compete. The results are robust to the use of methods that alleviate the self-selection problem and call for a reassessment of the diversification-performance relationship. Copyright 2008 by The American Finance Association.