Cross-border business relationships often involve significant risk because they entail greater information asymmetry and complexity to manage collaboration than domestic relationships. Yet, little is known about the contractual design of such relationships. We examine a prominent form of cross-border collaboration − firms’ strategic outsourcing in a host country where they operate − and contrast contracting choices with those made for similar home country relations. We collect survey data from Japanese subsidiaries operating and outsourcing in the Netherlands, and from Japanese firms outsourcing in Japan. Results show that contract complexity does not differ between similar home and host country relationships; however, consistent with our hypotheses, host country contracts have a shorter duration, more renewal provisions, less flexibility, and relatively greater contracting costs.

跨境业务关系通常涉及重大风险，因为与家庭关系相比，跨界业务关系需要更大的信息不对称性和管理协作的复杂性。然而，对这种关系的合同设计知之甚少。我们研究了跨国界合作的一种显着形式-公司在其经营所在国的战略外包-并将合同选择与为类似母国关系做出的选择进行对比。我们从在荷兰运营和外包的日本子公司以及在日本外包的日本公司收集调查数据。结果表明，相似的母国和东道国之间的合同复杂性没有差异。但是，根据我们的假设，东道国合同的期限较短，续约条款较多，灵活性较低，