A Model of Seller-Buyer Product Development Relationships in Technology-Based, Industrial Markets

This paper develops and empirically tests a model of seller-buyer relationships during the new product development process. Our model focuses on seller-buyer interactions during NPD, which revolve around education, product knowledge generation, and joint new product development activities and how they are influenced by several situational characteristics like prior relationship history, perceived buyer knowledge, and product customization. Our model also investigates an important consequence of these activity dimensions: expectations of continuity. In general, we find good support for our hypotheses related to the antecedents. However, mixed results were found for hypotheses relating these activity dimensions to expectations of relationship continuity.