Great Expectations: The Moderating Effects of Supplier Service Model and Market Dynamics on Relational Contract Performance
研究了供应商服务模式和市场动态如何调节关系契约中供应商违约决策，发现第三方经纪模式比资产型供应商更能应对需求挑战，且市场容量紧张时长期关系对拒绝业务的威慑力减弱。
Under a relational contract, the value placed on expected future business must outweigh the short-term temptations to deviate for the buyer–supplier relationship to persist. Operational and relational factors that influence this trade-off have been explored, however, there is a considerable lack of research on the moderating effects of supplier and market characteristics. We offer insights into how supplier service models and market dynamics impact suppliers’ decisions to renege on the relational contract. Limited access to transactional and contractual data has restricted previous exploration. We overcome this limitation with a detailed dataset in the for-hire truckload transportation sector. We find that a third-party brokerage service model is better able to overcome operational demand challenges and maintain service due to lower capacity constraints and pooling effects as compared to asset-based providers. Furthermore, when the overall market is capacity-constrained, long-term relationships become less of a deterrent for suppliers to reject business. In addition, during tightly constrained markets, suppliers respond with higher rejection rates to short-term demand surges but not to historical demand variability.