Since the first theoretical papers on Transaction Cost Economy, several studies have addressed the problem of designing governance forms in inter-firm relationship. Scholars have deeply investigated the problem and several theories have been proposed to face with it. The biopharmaceutical industry is one of the most interesting testbeds for understanding dynamics and rationality of governance forms in IFRs; indeed, in this industry the advent of the biotechnology has not been disruptive as in other industries, so that the newcomers, the biotech companies, and the incumbents, the pharmaceutical ones, have incurred in several types of IFRs such as licensing agreements, non-equity alliances, equity alliances and mergers and acquisitions. Thus, several papers have tried to investigate what kind of drivers influence the choice of the governance form in this industry, but most of them have focused on general characteristics of inter-firm agreements, such as the investment specificity, the number of prior ties, the technology distance and so forth. Differently from other researches, in this paper, we focus on specific characteristics of IFRs in the biopharma industry and we build a theoretical framework consisting of 13 drivers that are able to influence the governance mode of IFRs in this industry. We test our theoretical framework through an explorative empirical analysis. Even if more confirmative empirical analysis is needed, the empirical results evidence the validity of the theoretical framework proposed in this paper and provide some interesting managerial implications.
