Axelrod’s Landscape Alliance Formulation: How Can Balance of Threat Improve It?

Axelrod’s landscape approach has successfully shown its explanation power on various alliance formations, ranging from political, international relation, and business. The core of this approach is that parties tend to ally with strong parties that have similar background since they are expected to work well together. Nonetheless, there are cases that deviate from this concept; hence, they fail to explain using Axelrod’s landscape approach. This study provides several business illustrations, i.e. airline alliances as well as the alliances between Indonesian Ride-Hailing and e-Commerce companies. This study also proposes a concept to deal with this issue, i.e. by injecting the balance of threat and complementarities concept into the original Axelrod’s landscape approach.