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1. Introduction
Today's highly competitive business environment has pushed companies to deliver the best possible value to their customers. As such, firms are seeking collaborative relationships outside their organizational boundaries to achieve competitive advantage (Richey et al., 2012). Among these collaborative strategies, horizontal logistics collaboration (HLC) has gained much attention in recent years. This practice (HLC) refers to the situation where two (or more) companies, operating at the same level in the supply chain, decide to work together to achieve mutual benefits (Raue and Wieland, 2015). Examples are two (or more) manufacturers that make group purchases to negotiate better prices, multiple transportation service providers that share transportation capacity to decrease their costs or multiple companies sharing storage capacity to increase storage space utilization. Despite the potential benefits of HLC [e.g. cost reduction, improved economic and service performance (Fugate et al., 2009)], successful real-world cases are rare (Basso et al., 2019). According to Schmoltzi and Wallenburg (2011), 50% and 70% of HLC relationships fail. This raises the need to understand why such an interesting strategy fails in practice by investigating the factors influencing its outcomes.
Compared to the well-established literature on vertical collaboration, studies analyzing the factors that influence HLC outcomes are rather limited (Martin et al., 2018; Wallenburg and Raue, 2011). The existing literature on HLC includes collaborative transportation, purchasing, warehousing and manufacturing (e.g. Verdonck, 2017; Walker et al., 2013; Reaidy et al., 2015; Seok and Nof, 2014). These studies highlight several factors with potential impact on HLC, such as information sharing, dedicated investments, trust, commitment, shared or geographically close customers or suppliers, and partners' similarity. Nevertheless, these contributions simply list relevant factors without empirically investigating their relationship with HLC outcomes. As such, understanding and quantifying the causal relationships between HLC enabling factors and its outcomes remain a priority.
In examining factors affecting HLC outcomes, the dynamics of the context have not attracted much attention. Saenz et al. (2015) posit that a firm's context defines which factors facilitate or hinder collaborative attitudes in HLC. While research on HLC does not support this premise, the literature available on vertical collaboration shows that contextual micro and macro factors impact the development and implementation of collaboration (Matopoulos et al., 2007; Van...