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1. Introduction
The past decade has brought a considerable paradigm change in modern business competition. The idea that firms compete as independent economic agents shifted toward the more holistic approach of supply chain competition, in which supply chain partners mutually compete against external supply chains (Cheung et al., 2011). Concurrent with the above paradigm change in business competition, partnership theory also transformed from an arm’s-length buyer-supplier management toward a mutual win-win emphasis of social exchange (Kim and Choi, 2015; Binder et al., 2008). Reasons for this shift are grounded in its theoretically highlighted economic advantages with the most potential for added value. Interorganizational partnerships theoretically enable firms to improve their performance and offer the potential to generate additional relational rents (Dyer and Singh, 1998; Lawson et al., 2009). However, industry practice shows that partners most often view each other as competitors of the mutually generated outcomes, resulting in zero-sum “pie-sharing competition” on the partnership’s financial distribution of earnings (Jap, 2001; Wagner and Hoegl, 2007). The practice of fairness in sharing the partnership’s pie becomes increasingly difficult, as its application lies at the crossroads between egoistically generating immediate results and ensuring a sustainable partnership performance. To establish high-performing supply chain networks, questions arise about how focal firms can ensure that adversarial competition is not carried out within their own supply chain, mainly caused by pie-sharing rivalry among partners (Cheung et al., 2011).
In this paper, we analyze influential factors and new product development (NPD) consequences of fairness in pie-sharing within buyer-supplier NPD partnerships. We answer the following two research questions:
Which mediating role brings opportunism onto the relationship between pie-sharing fairness and NPD performance?
Which influential factors affect the perception of pie-sharing fairness in the first place?
For empirical data, we analyzed 147 buyer-supplier NPD partnerships within the automotive industry using structural equation modeling (SEM) in SPSS AMOS.
By answering our research questions, we contribute to the literature in three ways. First, buyer-supplier partnerships have historically been characterized by focusing on material factors. However, social factors such as fairness are significantly gaining importance (Wagner et al., 2011). Reasons can be found in the lopsided distribution of the financial pie, resulting in poisoned relationships (Samaha et al., 2011). Despite...