Interfirm collaboration is a key phenomenon in contemporary strategy research. However, our understanding of the collaboration antecendents i.e. of why firms collaborate while others do not are sparse and fragmented.
Our study identifies four types of antecedents in prior literature: rational which are connected to strategic objectives, structural with refer to the embeddedness of collaboration in wider sets of relationships, relational which are connected to the positive content of interfirm linkages, and cognitive. We run a structural equation model on a sample of 368 tourism firms operating within 74 Local Tourism Organizations in Poland. We find varied support for the hypothesized relationships in a simple SEM model.
