Purpose – The aim of this paper is to examine the newly formed a partnership of Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway (Berkshire) and JPMorgan through the lens of strategic alliance, corporate philanthropy, and corporate social responsibility. Research design, data, and methodology – This is an analytical case study that examines the existing scholarly articles in strategic alliances, corporate philanthropy, and corporate social responsibility to explain the recent strategic alliance. Results - There is a clear limitation in explaining this type of unconventional strategic alliance with exiting definitions and concepts because there is no existing study or case available today. Forming a strategic business alliance to create and operate healthcare for their domestic employees could be viewed as a social innovation that resulted from an effort to resolve a social problem, the ineffective healthcare system in the U.S., rather than focusing on business benefits and profits. Conclusions – The success or failure of this type of business alliance would certainly affect the current healthcare system of the United States and global businesses and healthcare industries in the future. However, just entering or tapping into uncharted territory by these three companies to deal with a social issue is significant enough to merit further exploration and analysis for scholars and practitioners.

This study analyze factors influencing business performance by types of agricultural corporation for improving performance. The number of agricultural corporations have been increasing but their profitability has been decreasing. In this situation, it is important to analyze factors influencing business performance for improving their profitability. We estimate a model including financial indexes and corporation’s characters using ordinary least square. We use agricultural corporations survey data for 10years(2005~2014) of Statistics Korea. This study analyze bookkeeping recorded agricultural corporations for the same period. As a result, we find factors to influence Return on Assets(ROA). Additionally, we calculate optimized current ratio and debt ratio for ROA maximization. Operation period and the number of full-time workers also have a positive effect on ROA. Agricultural production, processing and distribution variables by business types have a positive effect on ROA, but some of their interaction terms have a negative effect on ROA. We expect that this result will help for improving corporation’s business performance.