Negotiating Stances Used with Minority Suppliers: A Research Note

While new ways of organizing exchange have become prominent in business-to-business markets, the function of corporate minority supplier purchasing programs in this changing organizational environment has received scant attention. Specifically, the extent to which the present structure of minority supplier purchasing programs enhances -- or deters -- the creation of strategic partnerships, impacts the way buyers and suppliers interact, and ultimately determines the efficacy of these exchange relationships has not been sufficiently addressed in the literature. The present study examines the relationship between the minority supplier categorization (versus those not classified as such) and the negotiation stances that purchasing agents undertake with these suppliers. Data were collected using a mail survey of university purchasing agents. The purchasing agents were asked to select a supplier which is a participant in his or her organization’s minority supplier purchasing program and answer questions about a recent negotiation with that supplier. For purposes of comparison, a random sample of purchasing agents was asked to respond with regard to negotiations with a supplier which was not a participant in any of the organization’s supplier purchasing programs. Cluster analysis was used to examine the negotiation stances used by the purchasing agents

Flying to Quality: Cultural Influences on Online Reviews

Customers increasingly consult opinions expressed online before making their final decisions. However, inherent factors such as culture may moderate the criteria and the weights individuals use to form their expectations and evaluations. Therefore, not all opinions expressed online match customers’ personal preferences, neither can firms use this information to deduce general conclusions. Our study explores this issue in the context of airline services using Hofstede’s framework as a theoretical anchor. We gauge the effect of each dimension as well as that of cultural distance between the passenger and the airline on the overall satisfaction with the flight as well as specific service factors. Using topic modeling, we also capture the effect of culture on review text and identify factors that are not captured by conventional rating scales. Our results provide significant insights for airline managers about service factors that affect more passengers from specific cultures leading to higher satisfaction/dissatisfaction

Factors influencing consumers\u27 online shopping in China

The purpose of this paper is to develop an understanding of the factors influencing Chinese consumers to shop online by exploring the effects of user demographic characteristics and media characteristics on shopping intention. A nationwide online survey of 503 Chinese consumers was carried out to test the proposed conceptual model of online shopping intention using hierarchical regression. The results support most of the proposed hypotheses. Chinese consumers\u27 age, income, education and marital status, and their perceived usefulness are significant predictors of online shopping intention. Future research should use actual online purchases as the dependent variable and explore the effects of product characteristics, merchants and intermediate characteristics, as well as environmental influences in online shopping behavior. Consideration of individual differences in explaining Chinese consumers\u27 online buying intention could provide a better understanding of users\u27 adoption of the internet as a shopping and transaction channel, as well as enhance an e-tailer\u27s market targeting and segmentation effectiveness. E-marketers should incorporate features that can enhance online shopping efficiency. Given the tremendous growth of B2C e-commerce in China, there is a critical need for understanding what drives Chinese consumers to shop online. As one of the few large-scale empirical studies on Chinese consumers\u27 online shopping behavior, these results will enable e-marketers to better design their e-marketing strategies that cater to Chinese consumers\u27 changing needs and lifestyles and improve their online shopping experiences and satisfaction. © 2013, Emerald Group Publishing Limited. All rights reserved

What Drives Importer Opportunism? : Learning from a Developing Country in Latin America

This research integrates transaction cost and relational exchange theories to depict a more nuanced explanation of exporter-importer exchange relationships when exporters operate from a developing country. Our study examines whether exporters’ investments in specific assets directly influence perceived importer opportunism, or whether these perceptions are driven by the mediating effects of interpersonal and inter-organizational trust and power. Contrary to the general transaction cost argument, we did not find any direct effect of exporter specific assets on perceived importer opportunism. Instead, we found that perceived importer power and exporter inter-organizational trust jointly mediate the exporter specific assets – perceived importer opportunism relationship. By incorporating a dimensional view of trust, we help to resolve conflicting theoretical specifications and empirical results found in the extant literature.CC BY-NC-ND 4.0CONTACT A. F. M. Jalal Ahamed [email protected] School of Business, University of Skövde, Högskolevägen 8, Skövde SE-541 28, Sweden. The author is thankful for generous support provided under a USFQ-CADE grant 2018.</p