Growing complexity in the competitive environment has made it difficult for a firm to relyon its own capability alone to accomplish its market performance. Consequently, firms haveestablished diverse inter-firm cooperative initiatives such as cooperative marketing or sharingproduction capacity or R&D resources. These cooperative initiatives have been perceived asan effective way of securing capabilities or resources that a firm lacks. While some of these initiatives lead to unprecedented successes, others fail to produceintended benefits. These failures have been attributed to the firm’s lack of careful considerationof pre-requisites for successful inter-firm cooperation prior to embarking on such initiatives. In this research, we examined the effect and the process of such inter-firm cooperativeefforts of sharing resources in the area of marketing, production and R&D on the firm’smarketing performance, in order to identify critical success factors for inter-firm cooperation. We first identified relationship benefits as an initiating factor for inter-firm cooperation, andspecified trust and resource exchange between firms as prerequisite factors for relationshipbenefits to lead to enhancement of the participating firm’s marketing performance. We formulated six hypotheses concerning the relationships between these factors. Hypothesisone through six concerns the positive relationships between inter-firm relationship benefitsand marketing performance, between relationship benefits and inter-firm trust, betweenrelationship benefits and resource exchange, between trust and resource exchange, betweentrust and marketing performance, and finally between resource exchange and marketingperformance, respectively. In order to test the proposed hypotheses, data collected through phone interviews andmail surveys administered among corporate decision makers of the firms which have beeninvolved in inter-firm cooperative initiatives before were analyzed using a covariancestructure analysis. Results showed support for all hypotheses except the hypothesis on thepositive relationship between relationship benefits and resource exchange. These results imply that in order for an inter-firm cooperative initiative to succeed,there should exist clearly identified relationship benefits. Results also show, however, thatrelationship benefits do not automatically lead to resource exchange and require mutualtrust. Hence, firms interested in seeking inter-firm cooperation should first identify clearmutual relationship benefits, build trust and exchange resources in order to reap fullbenefits from the cooperation.