• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• 제16권4호
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• pp.121-149
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• 2006

This study tries to explain how the relationship-specificity of invested assets affects E-collaboration and consequently on performance of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). We classify the relationship-specificity of invested assets into four types such as business process specificity, physical asset specificity, domain knowledge specificity, and site specificity. We define E-collaboration as composed of Electronic Information Sharing (EIS) and Electronic Cooperation (E-Co). In addition, we articulate firm's performance as operational and strategic one, and investigate the impacts of EIS and E-Co on its performance. The data were collected from 187 SMEs and used for analysis. Based on the survey results, we find the following: (1) EIS is directly influenced by business process specificity and physical asset specificity, (2) E-Co is affected by site specificity and domain knowledge specificity, (3) EIS has a positive and significant impact on E-Co, (4) EIS affects firm's operational performance, (5) E-Co influences on firm's strategic performance. In conclusions, the higher the level of EIS, SMEs seem to get greater operational performance, Respectively, the higher the level of E-Co, they tend to get greater strategic performance.