Decisions when interacting in customer-supplier relationships

Abstract

The importance of choices regarding customer-supplier relationships and their content has been documented in numerous studies on business markets. The decision-making process behind the choices has been explored much less and we know relatively little about how the related decisions are reached. Yet, it is plausible that the decision-making process is related to the effectiveness of decisions and their economic and developmental effects on businesses. In this conceptual paper, based on a selective literature review, we explore what prior research on customer-supplier relationships in business markets suggests about the context in which decisions are made and what research on decision making in management, that examines the use of heuristics when making decision, suggests about the rationale for such rule-based decision-making process. Research in the IMP tradition suggests that interactive situations in high involvement customer-supplier relationships require decision making which reflects an ‘adaptive’ rather than an ‘axiomatic’ conception of rationality. We contend that deepening the adaptive sense of decision making in interactions may benefit from contributions from recent research on the use of heuristics in the field of applied psychology, and that this deepening opens for a new perspective in industrial marketing on firm's capabilities to develop and maintain high involvement interorganizational business relationships and on related critical issues for management.