Big Picture Thinking in Small Pieces: Disentangling the Multi-Partner Collaboration

We study partnership within multi-partner collaborative projects. Multi-partners closely collaborate such as sponsors alliance and loan syndicate for financing big projects. A big challenge is to form a multi-partner collaboration. It involves tough and delicate financial negotiations between partners before ending the financial closing period, incurring huge ex ante transaction costs and deferring the provision of public services to citizens. Our hypotheses are tested by using an original database containing about 1,100 projects across 80 countries and eight different sectors between 2001 to 2019. Our study makes three contributions to research on inter-organizational collaboration. It contributes by extending the unit of analysis from collaboration between firms to collaboration between alliances. Inter-alliance collaborations are not like a dyadic alliance. Our study advances research on multi-partner collaboration by investigating their formation and composition. It also contributes to inter-organizational relationships by analyzing the different aspects of multi-partner roles and functions, exposure to risks, and monitoring ability.