Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
insignii cant except for employment size, specialization and business association mem-
bership. According to this i nding, collecting image material in the same topic specialty
and being a member of the business association increases the odds of having a licence
agreement. In contrast, however, dissimilarity also drives alliance formation. The higher
the dif erence in employment size, the more likely are two agencies to initiate a licence
agreement. This result would argue more in favour of diversity than similarity. It might
rel ect an emerging division of labour between big agencies that source their image
material increasingly from small supplying agencies (see Glückler, 2005). It has to be
emphasized that none of the signii cant ef ects explains more than 1 per cent of overall
variance in the distribution. Hence, the impact of i rm similarity may be summarized as
being negligible.
Geography
A second argument about preferential partner choice holds that geographi-
cal proximity between partners increases the likelihood of an alliance. Three quarters of
all agencies in the 2005 alliance network are located in one of the top i ve metropolitan
Figure 14
.
3
Metropolitan clustering of stock picture agencies in Germany, 2005
