Multimarket Contact and the Use of Power in Buyer–Supplier Relationships
研究买方和供应商之间的多市场接触如何影响双方在关系中运用奖励、强制和法律合法三种中介权力，发现多市场接触促使供应商更多使用法律合法权力，而买方更多使用奖励权力、更少使用法律合法权力。
Buyers and suppliers often have multiple business relationships with each other across different geographical and product markets, forming a potentially complex web of connections. What happens between the firms in one geographical or product market may influence their interactions in others. Prior research in strategic management has found that similar multimarket contact in horizontal relationships between competitors has important consequences for the firms’ use of market power. However, the consequences of multimarket contact in vertical buyer–supplier relationships remain unexplored. Building on resource‐advantage theory, this study proposes that multimarket contact between buyers and suppliers is linked to their respective propensity to use three types of mediated power in their relationships (i.e., reward, coercion, and legal legitimate) and that the effects of multimarket contact differ between buyers and suppliers. A vignette study with 143 purchasing managers and 137 business‐to‐business sales managers tests the developed hypotheses. The findings show that a higher level of multimarket contact encourages suppliers to use legal legitimate power to a greater extent and encourages buyers to use reward power to a greater extent but legal legitimate power to a lesser extent.