Cooperation Contracts between Embedded Firms
研究了企业间合作中契约承诺的使用，结合交易成本经济学与社会嵌入性理论，认为社会嵌入机制可弥补契约的不完备性，并基于92个荷兰跨国公司的合作数据验证假设。
Successful inter-firm cooperations require that the participating partners mitigate potential opportunistic behaviour. Contractual commitments are one management mechanism to achieve stable mutual cooperation. However, the impossibility in designing complete, explicit and easily enforceable contracts restricts their efficacy as a management mechanism. Mechanisms based on the social embeddedness of the partners can form a viable alternative and compliment for contracts. Hence, the usage of contractual commitments is explained by combining transaction cost economic reasoning with arguments on the social embeddedness of economic transactions. Finally, the derived hypotheses are tested on a data-set of 92 cooperations within five Dutch multinationals.