Relation-specific investment of the group of companies
Despite the deep scientific study of the theory of resource management, there is a lack of terminology consistency in terms of the choice of the most significant resources for the effective operation of companies that make up integration formation. There is a problem of identifying and applying specific assets in the practice of cooperative interaction between companies. The subject of the research is the development of a typology of companies’ group resources. The methodological basis of the study was the new institutional economic theory. According to this theory, the main criterion in making decisions about resources is the specificity. It has been proven that when implementing a cooperative strategy, a group of companies should invest in resources that have specific and idiosyncratic characteristics. Owning and disposing of such assets raises a number of problems, including hold-up problem, significant switching costs of alternative transaction, and reserve utility that causes underinvestment in assets. The study of reserve utility led to the development of an additional classification of specific assets: “selfish” and “cooperative”. A three-dimensional classification of company resources based on transaction frequency, level of specificity, and investment focus is proposed. The paper concludes that in the presence of a large volume of idiosyncratic resources of the cooperative type, the incentives for a rigid form of integration increase sharply. The converse is also true: in a vertical form of integration, it is important to separate the management of specific assets from non-specific ones.