Electronic B2B Marketplaces - Will They Have an Impact on Buyer-Seller- Relationships? - An Empirical Investigation in the German Hospital Sector

The use of information technology in business-to-business transactions (commonly referred to as B2B ECommerce) has gained a lot of attention throughout the last years. Even though the euphoria about the possibilities of using electronic media has subsided, IT has subtly altered the way companies do transactions. B2B E-Commerce can take many different forms (EDI, E-Shops, etc.). In this research, we focus on Electronic B2B Marketplaces. Electronic B2B Marketplaces are information systems that bring together several business buyers and business sellers and facilitate their transactions by using electronic communication. Electronic markets have for some time been the object of study of research. Drawing on New Institutionalism, scholars like Thomas Malone argued that electronic markets would encourage a shift towards more market-like coordination of transactions (cf. Malone/Yates/Benjamin 1987). Following their line of arguments would imply concluding that closeness in existing buyer-supplier-relationships should be reduced. Empirical verification of these hypotheses has been limited so far. The question whether the use of Electronic B2B Marketplaces has any effect on existing buyer-supplier-relationships still needs to be investigated. This paper tries to contribute to understanding these effects. During the last two years, a number of Electronic B2B Marketplaces for hospital supplies have emerged in the German market. In an empirical study, 115 hospitals were asked to evaluated the likelihood that they would use Electronic B2B Marketplaces for specific products and their expectations on how this would alter the relationship with their current supplier. We selected communication, cooperation, long-term orientation and the intention to expand business with the supplier as aspects relating to the interaction process and the relationship atmosphere probably being influenced by the use of Electronic B2B Marketplaces. We hypothesize that the use of Electronic B2B Marketplaces for information purposes would rather decrease, whereas the use for transaction purposes would increase relationship closeness. The study reveals that the use of Electronic B2B Marketplaces for information purposes has a tendentiously negative but insignificant effect on most constructs of relationship closeness. On the contrary, the use of Electronic B2B Marketplaces for processing transactions has a significantly positive effect on all factors of relationship closeness under consideration but general-purpose communication. Limitations of the study (e.g. the slow adoption of Electronic B2B Marketplaces by hospitals and suppliers) have to be considered when deducting implications for management from these research results.