Selecting Business Partners: A Literature Review

Understanding when and why certain business partners are more attractive is an important research issue for achieving a better understanding of successful cooperation between business partners. The literature concerning partner selection is however fragmented, studying the topic from different angles, with different theoretical perspectives and in different research fields. This article provides therefore a literature review on partner selection in inter-organizational relationships (IOR). We identify fifty-eight articles on partner selection in a business context. We divide this literature into the following five streams: need determination & partner search, partner selection process, negotiating & structuring the IOR, operating the IOR, and performance evaluation. For each of these five streams, we discuss a number of research gaps and we make several suggestions with avenues for future research.