Buyers’ Strategic Behavior in B2B Multichannel Auction Markets: When an Online Posted Price Channel Is Incorporated into a Dutch Auction System

May Truong (), Alok Gupta (), Wolfgang Ketter () and Eric van Heck ()
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May Truong: IE Business School, IE University, 28006 Madrid, Spain
Alok Gupta: Information and Decision Sciences, Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455
Wolfgang Ketter: Faculty of Management, Economics, and Social Sciences, University of Cologne, 50923 Köln, Germany; Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, 3062 PA, Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Eric van Heck: Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, 3062 PA, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

Information Systems Research, 2022, vol. 33, issue 4, 1344-1367

Abstract: Firms are increasingly adopting different sales channels to reach new potential buyers. Yet, extant research has mainly focused on business-to-customer (B2C) online and offline posted price channels. Business-to-business (B2B) multichannel and, especially, systems with multiple pricing mechanisms are largely underexplored. This paper investigates the strategic behaviors of B2B buyers in a unique system where an online posted price channel is incorporated into a Dutch auction market sequentially. We follow buyers’ purchasing paths and examine conditions under which B2B auction buyers will use the online posted price channel. We incorporate learning and experience and demonstrate how buyers’ behaviors evolve. We investigate an emerging group of buyers who use different price mechanisms and their surplus extraction activities. We further explore how the market flow changes when posted prices are incorporated. Our results, using an extensive data set from the world’s largest flower market, highlight the importance of quantity demand, product diversity, and experience in explaining the choice of the new posted price channel. We find a significantly higher average loss of surplus at the product level for multichannel buyers than for single channel buyers and a reduction in the number of small orders in the auction channel. Subsequently, theoretical and managerial implications for B2B multichannel markets and market design are discussed.

Keywords: multichannel market; buyers strategic behavior; B2B trading; Dutch auctions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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