The Routledge Companion to Trust

13Trust and Contracts

Complements versus substitutes in business-to-business exchanges

Laura Poppo and Zheng Cheng^*

Introduction

Across companies, large and small, managers often rely on other companies to do work for them. For example, companies that focus on their core, value-added activities typically outsource support functions such as payroll, maintenance, staffing, benefits and IT support. When expanding to new products or geographic markets, managers often form alliances to access skills, knowledge and/or resources that they lack. Geographic distances can also complicate the management of such alliances as supply chains often take on a global footprint. The optimal outcome of such business-to-business (i.e. B2B) transactions is cooperation: ...