Don’t stand so close to me: competitive pressures, proximity and inter-organizational collaboration

This paper investigates how geographical proximity moderates the non-monotonic relation between niche overlap and the propensity of organizations to collaborate. The main prediction is that the strength of this relation is different for organizations with low versus high levels of geographical proximity. Proposed hypotheses are tested by using data collected within a community of hospital organizations serving more than 5 million residents in one of the largest Italian geographical regions. After controlling for internal resource complementarities and differences in organizational forms, behavioural orientations and institutional constraints among hospitals, this paper finds strong empirical support to the research hypotheses.