Determinants of EDI Adoption and Integration by U.S. and Japanese Automobile Suppliers

Abstract

This article examines determinants of Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) adoption and integration in 76 U.S. and 93 Japanese automobile suppliers. The article constructs several hypotheses based on the transaction-cost and resource-dependence approaches and tests these hypotheses by data from these suppliers. Our study showed: (1) U.S. firms were more EDI-integrated with their customers, while Japanese firms adopted more EDI with their suppliers; (2) the resource-dependence approach seemed more effective in explaining EDI adoption, while the transaction-cost approach seemed more effective in explaining EDI integration; (3) the transaction-cost approach seemed more suited to the U.S. context, while the resource-dependence approach seemed more suited to the Japanese context; (4) EDI adoption had a positive impact on EDI performance in the U.S., suggesting the higher validity of our framework in the U.S.