Study On Determinants Of Manufacturer's Relationship Commitment In High Technology Markets

The existing research on relationship commitment at home and abroad has focused on conventional marketing channels, stressed the study on the concept of relationship commitment, the construct of the dimensions, the influence factors and the outcome variables. However, in high technology markets, there is little research about relationship commitment. Compared with conventional markets, high technology markets have distinct characteristics, reflected in the uncertainty of technology and motivation of technology in high technology markets.Thus, it needs to be further test if it is suitable to apply relationship commitment theory of conventional markets to high technology markets.Based on adequate discussion about the characteristics of the high technology markets and the theory of relationship commitment, we discussed how to achieve manufacturer's relationship commitment in the distributor's perspective.Because of the unique characteristics of high technology markets, we introduce the technology uncertainty (technology dynamism and technology diversity) and distributor's idiosyncratic investments as the antecedents of manufacturer's relationship commitment; because of the characteristics of marketing channels, we introduce the manufacturer's relationship termination costs and distributor's information sharing as the antecedents of manufacturer's relationship commitment. So, we build our relationship commitment (contains calculative commitment and affective commitment) research modal contained the former five variables.In the empirical study, data was collected from the computer and office equipment distributors.In the development of the scale, we used the existing scale of the relevant research in the foreign country, and made some adjustment based on the research circumstances. In the last, the measurement scale of this paper was developed.250 questionnaires were sent out and 230 questionnaires were received,16 invalid and incomplete answered questionnaires were rejected and 214 valid questionnaires were used for this research. In the analysis of the data, we employ the reliability analysis and validity analysis, then we use correlation analysis and regression analysis to examine our hypotheses,the results of the analysis support our hypotheses for the most part.The results of this research show that, in high technology markets, technology dynamism has significant negative impact on manufacturer's calculative commitment, whereas technology diversity has significant positive impact on manufacturer's calculative commitment; both of distributor's idiosyncratic investments and distributor's information sharing have significant positive impact on manufacturer's affective commitment; manufacturer's relationship termination costs have significant positive impact on manufacturer's calculative commitment but have no impact on manufacturer's affective commitment; the relationship between manufacturer's relationship termination costs and manufacturer's affective commitment is moderated by manufacturer's trust.