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In the current highly competitive marketing environment, there are few situations in which customers attempt to build and maintain relationships with marketers. In large‐format retail situations, customers maintain a non‐personal association with the store and personal relationships with salespersons. By contrast, many customers in developing countries such as India build and maintain long‐term relationships directly with the small‐scale retailers, who happen to be the owners as well as the salespersons of the store. The purpose of this paper is to focus on customer dependence on the retailer, a rare phenomenon which is evident in rural areas of India even today.

The paper is based on an empirical study of a buyer‐seller relationship between a farmer and a chemical fertilizer retailer, which is a common interpersonal business constellation in India.

The paper identifies the determinants of customer dependence as customer perceived market uncertainty, product importance and product familiarity. The paper also explains the positive effects of customer dependence on customer trust.

Traditionally, customer dependence is viewed as a structural constraint in relationship outcomes. The effect of customer dependence on power, control and opportunistic behavior in the buyer‐seller relationship context is well researched. This paper applies an interpersonal trust‐development perspective and views customer dependence as a positive relationship construct and fills an apparent gap in research on customer dependence in the context of the interpersonal buyer‐seller relationship.

Servitization is a business transformation that increases service provision in manufacturers. This study aims to empirically examine how a manufacturer's global supply chain dependence and its power positions affect its servitization output.

This study employs secondary longitudinal datasets and econometric specifications to test the relationship between global supply chain dependence and servitization. It further examines the moderating roles of the firm's market power and the degree of being principal customers and principal suppliers. Heterogeneity analyses are performed to verify the robustness of the results.

The findings indicate that fewer global suppliers and more global customers contribute to a higher level of servitization. The negative effect of global supplier dependence is mitigated when manufacturers have less market power and are the principal customers for most of their suppliers. The positive effect of global customer dependence is stronger when manufacturers have less market power and their customers are less dependent on the manufacturers.

Data mixing manufacturing and service inputs and data on public US manufacturers may restrict the generalizability of the findings. Nonetheless, the study urges future research to focus more on other countries/markets.

This study encourages manufacturers who servitize their businesses to connect with more global customers and fewer global suppliers and manage powers among stakeholders. Other recommendations for policymakers and industry associations are also proposed.

This study is the first to explore the impacts of the global supply chain dependence on servitization. Multiple-level findings offer important implications for researchers and practitioners.

The purpose of this study is to conduct an empirical investigation into the impact of supply chain dependence (including customer dependence and supplier dependence) on credit risk through the lens of social network theory (SNT) by focusing on how to manage firm risk using supply chain relationships in the context of Chinese small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

Using data from public databases, this study selects a unique sample from a Chinese SME board and uses an ordered logistic regression model to investigate the relationship between the dependence on major customers or suppliers and both credit risk and credit rating. It is found that the results are robust to the use of different empirical methods.

The main findings of this study are that a firm’s dependence on major customers is positively related to its credit risk but negatively related to its credit rating, while a firm’s dependence on major suppliers is positively related to its credit risk but negatively related to its credit rating.

To broaden the understanding of industrial marketing and purchasing, this study contributes to research on supply chain relationship management and risk management by focusing on SMEs’ dependence on major customers and suppliers and empirically examining the influence of this dependence on both credit risk and credit rating in an emerging market.

This study aims to explore how absorptive and joint learning can foster radical innovation. Furthermore, dependence asymmetry is investigated as a moderator of the effects of these factors on radical innovation. Radical innovation is an important source of any firm’s success. Yet, there has been a dearth of research in the literature on how different types of inter-partner learning cultivate the process of generating such innovation.

The authors use a sample of 204 Taiwanese electronics suppliers to test the effects of joint learning and absorptive learning on radical innovation. The empirical analysis adopts a structural equations modeling approach.

The authors find that a supplier’s joint learning has a stronger effect on radical innovation than its absorptive learning. However, when accounting for the moderating effect of dependence asymmetry, the analysis shows that absorptive learning does have a significant effect on radical innovation. The effect of joint learning on radical innovation is not moderated by the degree of dependence asymmetry.

This study broadens and deepens the understanding of how radical innovation by suppliers can be generated in customer–supplier relationships, and how this is shaped by the power-dependence structure.

Inter-partner learning; radical innovation; power; dependence.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the joint influence of dependence and trust in supply chain relationships on supply chain integration (SCI) and financial performance.

This study develops a dependence-trust-SCI-performance model and tests it using structural equation modeling based on empirical data collected from 617 manufacturers in China.

The results show that trust with customers/suppliers significantly influences SCI. Although dependence on customers/suppliers has no direct effect on SCI, it improves SCI indirectly through trust with customers/suppliers. Both supplier integration and customer integration significantly improve financial performance.

This study suggests that manufacturers should manage dependence and trust in supply chain relationships simultaneously to enable SCI. When there is high-level dependence on customers/suppliers, manufacturers should invest resources to develop trust with those customers/suppliers. Moreover, to achieve a better financial performance, manufacturers should integrate with both customers and suppliers.

This study contributes to the literature by providing empirical evidence regarding the direct effect of trust on SCI, and the indirect influence of dependence on SCI through trust. This extends extant knowledge regarding the joint impact of dependence and trust on SCI. Hence, both researchers and practitioners should pay attention to interdependence among different relationship management practices. Moreover, this study also empirically supports the argument that SCI improves firms ' financial performance.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between customer loyalty and customer dependence in the context of modern format and traditional format stores. In the process, the role of switching cost and trust in this relationship has been explored.

Building on the literature, the authors have postulated a conceptual model and formulated relevant hypotheses. Quantitative methodology is applied with previously established. The data were collected through convenient sampling. Methods like Factor analysis, cross-tab and regression analysis have been used.

The findings indicate a significant relationship between customer loyalty and customer dependence. Switching cost and trust have been found to have a moderating effect over the relationship in both modern and traditional environments.

The limitation is the restriction to the Jammu context. The studies have brought about the difference in attitudinal and behavioural loyalty. Future research can be carried out on the role of dependence in explaining and strengthening this relationship.

The present study provides an insight into for the customer loyalty and customer dependence in the context of modern and traditional retail formats.

The topic of this research focuses on companies’ perceived time and relationship dependencies in supply chains. The empirical findings are based upon a mail survey in the Swedish automotive industry. The principal contribution is a typology of vulnerability scenarios in supply chains based upon perceived time and relationship dependencies towards both suppliers and customers. A methodological contribution of this study is its simultaneous consideration of companies’ inbound and outbound supply chains.

This research focuses on the construct of perceived vulnerability, which is based on the gap between perceived trust and perceived dependence in business relationships with suppliers and customers. The outcome of this study is generated from the empirical findings of a survey in the Swedish vehicle industry. These empirical findings indicate that there is to a large extent a significant association between companies' perceived trust and dependence in business relationships towards their suppliers and customers, i.e. that trust is important in lean business relationships. The contributions of this research are a generic conceptualisation of the vulnerability construct, a see‐saw model of perceived vulnerability and a typology of perceived vulnerability scenarios in business relationships.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether supplier dependence is related to innovation in supplier firms. Drawing on resource dependence theory, the authors hypothesized that supplier dependence has both positive and negative relationships to the quantity and quality of innovation.

The study is based on data collected from US companies. Negative binomial regression analysis was used to test the proposed hypothesis.

The authors found that the quantity of innovation of a supplier firm initially decreased and then increased with the extent of the dependence upon major customers. This finding supports the idea that the benefits of supplier dependence mitigate the negative outcomes of dependence upon major customers.

This study extends the literature on supplier dependence by empirically examining the relationship between supplier dependence and the quantity and quality of innovation within the context of high-technology industries. The authors provide a holistic understanding of the value of the dependent relationship in boosting innovation in the context of supply chain management.

This study aims to identify the types of relationships that intermediaries form with their suppliers and customers in the apparel supply chain and their implications for performance.

Cluster analysis was conducted on the supplier and customer relationships of 90 trade intermediaries in the apparel industry.

Three configurations were identified: moderately dependent relationships with suppliers and customers and moderate flexibility upstream; highly dependent relationships with suppliers and customers but low flexibility upstream; and relationships with suppliers and customers that are low in dependence. Performance of firms using these configurations differed. Firms that cultivated some dependence upstream and downstream performed best. Firms with highly dependent relationships with suppliers and customers but low flexibility upstream performed almost as well. This group was highly skilled in relationship management. Firms that maintained low dependence with suppliers and customers performed the worst.

Findings were based on a limited sample of 90 firms. Relationship configurations may differ in other industries, e.g. car industry.

For a supply chain to be effective, firms need to consider how they structure the relationships along the supply chain to facilitate the flow of information, goods and resources.

Prior research has considered relationships as independent dyads. This study looks at tripartite relationships involving suppliers and customers in the supply chain.