The complementary and substitutional effects of forced and emergent mechanisms in multisourcing

• Information systems multisourcing requires mechanisms that ensure both competition and cooperation. • Multisourcing arrangements may fruitfully combine cooperation-enhancing and competition-enhancing mechanisms if the mechanisms are of the same type (force versus emergent). • Conversely, the coexistence of forced and emergent mechanisms, which rely on economic versus social logics, can result in substitution effects. This paper examines the effect of forced and emergent competition- and cooperation-enhancing mechanisms on joint multisourcing performance. We draw on research on coopetition in IS multisourcing and the literature on the crowding-out effect to theorise the interplay between these mechanisms. We argue that the key to understanding whether these mechanisms complement or substitute each other lies in the distinction between forced and emergent mechanisms, as these respectively invoke either an economic or a social logic among vendors. We test these ideas through a survey study of 108 multisourcing arrangements. Our results show that while a forced competition and an emergent cooperation mechanism can individually improve joint performance in multisourcing, the co-existence of economic and social logics results in a substitutional effect. A complementary effect is achieved when competition and cooperation mechanisms are of the same logic. Our study extends the existing IS outsourcing literature by shedding light on the role of forced and emergent mechanisms, either as competition or cooperation-enhancing, in enhancing multisourcing performance.