Portfolios of buyer–supplier exchange relationships in an online marketplace for IT services

Most studies on the role of IT for economic exchange predicted that under a given set of exchange attributes buyers would choose a certain mode of relationship with suppliers. Our study of an online IT services marketplace revealed that buyers do not have a single, uniformly preferred type of relati...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Decision Support Systems 2009-11, Vol.47 (4), p.297-306
Main Authors: Radkevitch, Uladzimir, van Heck, Eric, Koppius, Otto
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Auctions
Buyer–supplier relationships
Decision support systems
Economics
Electronic procurement
Information technology
IT services
Negotiations
On-line systems
Online
Online markets
Portfolios of relationships
Reverse auctions
Studies
Suppliers
Vendor supplier relations
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Summary:Most studies on the role of IT for economic exchange predicted that under a given set of exchange attributes buyers would choose a certain mode of relationship with suppliers. Our study of an online IT services marketplace revealed that buyers do not have a single, uniformly preferred type of relationship, but rather maintain a portfolio of relationships. Furthermore, different buyers arrange their portfolios of exchange relationships in different ways. We found four clusters of buyers' portfolios of relationships labeled Transactional buyers, Recurrent buyers, Small diversifiers and Large diversifiers, that differ in their usage of auction or negotiation mechanism, their supplier relations as well as their usage of preferred suppliers. Our results thus paint a richer picture of how buyers organize their supplier networks online.
ISSN:0167-9236
1873-5797
DOI:10.1016/j.dss.2009.05.007