Prospects for Cooperative Marketing among Surgical Instrument Producers in Pakistan

Given that clustered firms in developing countries generally sell theirgoods through multinational firms, we seek to determine under what conditionsmight clustered surgical instrument firms band together and form a cooperativeto “break out” of their relationship with multinational buyers to market theirown goods. Our results, based on a survey of surgical instrument producers inSialkot, Pakistan, demonstrate that firms are more likely to be interested in suchinitiatives once they have already had some direct experience in marketing, suchas selling products under their own brand name and having already sold somegoods directly to hospitals. Firms that have had relationships of longer durationwith customers tend to be less likely to be interested in joint action initiatives.This indicates that a higher opportunity cost of engaging in joint action (asproxied by relationships of longer duration) reduces the likelihood of cooperativemarketing initiatives in clusters.