Designing decision strategies for purchasing: results from an experimental study

This paper is concerned with deciding on how and when to make purchasing decisions. Such a strategy for decision making, (in short: a decision strategy), is often only made unconsciously and/or lacks sufficient differentiation. In other words: purchasers take many decisions as they come, rely strictly on experience and common sense for solving them and often only have very general procedures and checklists available for guidance. While this may be an appropriate strategy in certain situations, we argue that in many other instances other (more explicit, conscious and proactive) strategies should be pursued. We discuss the development and empirical testing of a meta-model approach which enables purchasers to design appropriate decision strategies for the various different purchasing situations relevant to their organisations. The objective of the research described in this paper is to deliver: (1) useful decision models for supporting purchasing decisions and (2) a meta-model approach that should make it possible to link different purchasing situations to adequate and useful decision models.