Trust and formal contracts: Complements or substitutes? A study of tourism collaboration in Poland

The aim of the paper is to explore whether trust and formal contracts should be treated only as substitutes, or – a less popular approach in the literature – as complementary bases for dyadic and network cooperation in the tourism sector. Sixteen in-depth interviews were conducted with tourist entrepreneurs running their businesses in different parts of Poland. Nine different circumstances were identified in which cooperation was based either on trust or formal contracts, or on both. The results suggest that these two bases of cooperation do not have to be treated as substitutes, as each of them has different functions and different origins. Moreover, written agreements are not a result of a lack of trust in a partner, but they do sometimes stem from other factors (e.g. accounting requirements in a company).