Preferred customer status, supplier satisfaction and their contingencies

Over the last decades, firms shift increasingly from traditional in-house value creation strategies to cooperative buyer–supplier relationships as a source of value creation and competitive advantage. To reap extensive benefits from relationships with suppliers, assuring supplier satisfaction and achieving preferred customer status are key for buyers. In the past, several mechanisms have been identified that influence supplier satisfaction and preferred customer status; however, little is known about the role of major contingency factors such as: product type, dependencies and power influencing them. This dissertation focuses on the potential of preferred customer status to mitigate the negative effects of buyer dependency, the influences of a buyer’s power usage on supplier satisfaction, and potential perception differences of preferred status in buyer-supplier relationships. Additionally, this dissertation adds novel methods (i.e. partial least squares point predictions and polynomial regressions with response surface modeling) together with a dyadic perspective to supplier satisfaction and preferred customer research. These methods enable an assessment of the predictive abilities of models, reveal curvilinear interaction effects and discover asymmetric relationships between factors, which would have not been discovered otherwise