A Structural Model of Organizational Buying for Business-to-Business Markets: Innovation Adoption with Share-of-Wallet Contracts
构建了首个组织购买的结构模型，研究B2B市场中创新扩散，发现钱包份额合同能加速小企业重大创新的扩散，并区分了买方主导和医生主导两类医院。
This article develops the first structural model of organizational buying to study innovation diffusion in business-to-business markets. The model is particularly applicable for routinized exchange relationships, whereby centralized buyers periodically evaluate and choose contracts and then downstream users order items on contracted terms. The model captures different utility trade-offs for users and buyers while accounting for how buyer and user choices interact to influence user adoption/usage and buyer contracting. Further, the authors consider the dynamics induced by share-of-wallet (SOW) pricing contracts, commonly used in business-to-business markets to reward customer loyalty with discounts for buying more than a threshold share from a supplier. The authors assemble novel panel data on surgeons’ product usage, SOW contracts, contract switching, and hospital characteristics. They find two segments of hospitals in terms of the relative power of surgeons and buyers: a buyer-centric segment and a surgeon-centric segment. Further, they find that innovations diffuse faster in teaching hospitals and when surgical procedures are concentrated among a few surgeons. Finally, the authors answer questions such as these: Should the marketer focus on push (buyer-focused) or pull (user-focused) strategies? Do SOW contracts hurt the innovations of smaller firms? Surprisingly, the authors find that SOW contracts can help speed the diffusion of major innovations from smaller players.