Smart Contracts in Strategic Alliances: Toward a Theory of Algorithmic-Relational Governance

Abstract

Strategic alliances have long required their participants to combine the certainty of formal contracts with the adaptive flexibility of relational mechanisms, and the substitutes-complements debate in alliance governance has spent decades trying to clarify how these two qualities can be combined.The recent emergence of blockchain-enabled smart contracts complicates this picture in interesting ways.This article asks how smart contracts interact with the contractual and relational governance mechanisms documented in the strategic alliance literature, what conditions shape this interaction, and what the implications are for alliance theory.Drawing on the alliance governance literature and the blockchain governance literature in roughly equal measure, the paper develops a framework that positions smart contracts as a third governance mechanism alongside contractual and relational forms, producing a hybrid arrangement termed algorithmic-relational governance.Three propositions are derived and illustrated through a case study of Walmart Canada's DL Freight platform, one of the larger production-grade smart contract deployments in a multi-party alliance setting.The findings suggest that smart contracts function primarily as governance complements rather than substitutes, that they alter alliance dynamics in ways transaction cost economics alone cannot predict, and that their effectiveness depends on deliberate architectural design choices that are themselves products of relational negotiation between alliance partners.