ABSTRACT
Economists have long been interested in co-operation among firms. Nonetheless, in the recent period, scientific work on this topic has been rapidly growing, both at the theoretical and (to a more limited extent) empirical level. This probably is a consequence of the surge in the number of co-operative arrangements concluded by firms in the 1980s and 1990s, which is documented by various sources (see the references in the studies by Dunning, and Delapierre and Mytelka in Chapters 2 and 4, respectively).
