The relationships between suppliers and buyers are often characterised by power differentials and dependence at the same time. This leads to the ability of a powerful buyer to benefit more from the relationship than the supplier. We examine how a supplier can strengthen its use of relation-specific IT with embeddedness to appropriate its share of relational benefits. We developed and tested a model of supplier relation-specific IT use, embeddedness, and buyer dependence on supplier. The results showed that embeddedness did not lead directly to the sharing of relational benefits; rather the appropriation of relational benefits is derived from buyer dependence.
This is an author-produced, peer-reviewed version of this article. The final, definitive version of this document can be found online at Information & Management, published by Elsevier. This author produced manuscript is provided under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Details regarding the use of this work can be found at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. doi: 10.1016/j.im.2015.06.008
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/michael_lee/22/