text: Another reaction that can sometimes occur instead of disproportionation is recombination. During recombination, two radicals form one new non-radical product and one new bond. Similar to disproportionation, the recombination reaction is exothermic and requires little to no activation energy. The ratio of the rates of disproportionation to recombination is referred to as k/k and often favors recombination compared with disproportionation for alkyl radicals. As the number of transferable hydrogens increase, the rate constant for disproportionation increases relative to the rate constant for recombination.