On lemons and indigestibility: resource assembly through joint ventures

We revisit the relationship between two theoretical perspectives on joint ventures—the asymmetric information view and the indigestibility view. The former emphasizes the ex ante valuation challenges firms confront in combining resources, while the latter attends to ex post transaction costs arising from the extraction and integration of indivisible resources. We argue that these two views are complementary, rather than competing, in explaining the usefulness of joint ventures. We also suggest that the perspectives are overlapping inasmuch as resource indivisibility contributes to asymmetric information.