One of the fundamental problems in supply chain management in general is that of finding the right trade-offs between information sharing and keeping one’s distance towards potential competitors.
Zeng et al. did a literature review to collect some of the current insights on how to solve this problem.
Setting up the right partnerships is hard to do. There are multiple levels to the decision with which companies to setup formal relations and how deep this relationship should be? Christopher and Jüttner (2000) develop a framework for managing partnerships. The full paper can be found here.