Governance of supplier-customer relations: An empirical review

The forest industry is riddled with exchange relationships. The parties to exchanges may have diverging goals and interests, but still depend upon each other due to non-redeployable specific assets. Formal and relational contracts may be used to deal with the resulting cooperation problems. This paper proposes a framework based on transaction cost economics and relational exchange theory, and examines to what extent empirical research has found formal and relational contracts to deal with three different governance problems. To that end, I review the results from 32 studies in a range of settings. These studies generally support the view that exchanges characterized by high degrees of specific assets should be supported by formal and relational contracts.