Antecedents of Relational Capital: The Role and Interplay of Organizational and Geographical Proximity

This paper merges economic geography and relational capital perspective in order to analyze the proximity-based antecedents of relational assets in brokerage. It investigates empirically the role and interplay of geographical and cognitive proximity between a broker and her buyers in a quantitative case- study. Its contribution is threefold: first, I distinguish between the effects of cognitive and geographical proximity and explore empirically their interplay on the relational assets. Second, I contribute to the under-researched field of studying the social context of relations by accounting for buyers characteristics. Lastly, I make use the under-researched empirical field of brokers.