La complémentarité entre formes de gouvernance

Observed relationships between off-season fruits wholesaler-importers and supermarket retailers show that governance structures are selected not only to minimize transactions costs. « Market» enables the marketing chain to adjust flexibly to the high degree of uncertainty. It also enables buyers to benefit from low purchase prices. However, it fails to elicit satisfactory management of product quality when that requires specific investments. That is the reason for the design of« hybrid forms ». Hybrids, however, do not offer sufficient flexibility. As a result, the wholesaler-importers and supermarket retailers employ both forms of governance, which turn out to be complements rather than substitutes. From a theoretical point of view, our study confirms several william- sonian intuitions. However, it invalidates the idea that choices are made solely on the basis of transaction costs. We show that economic agents evaluate paired «coordination properties/transaction costs», and that discrete forms of governance can be combined to obtain hybrid properties.