The Influence Of Outcome-based And Behavior-based Channel Incentives On Dealers' Opportunistic Behaviors:the Moderating Effects Of Immediacy Of Incentive And Dealer Dependence

Suppliers need distributors to effectively perform direct sales tasks and other complex tasks.The problem is that different channel members have their own independent goals that may conflict with each other.Dealers will try to maximize their profits and choose to sell the most profitable products.Therefore,it is necessary for the supplier to intervene in the dealer's behavior by some means.Channel incentive is an effective and conventional means of control,which usually means that the dealer performs certain tasks or achieves certain goals according to the policies of the supplier,so as to obtain compensation.But the provision and acceptance of incentives in the cross-organizational context is not well understood.The existing researches related to channel incentive are mostly based on principal-agent theory,and the basic assumption is that agents will respond positively to monetary incentives.This assumption has been questioned by many scholars,and there is a problem of so-called "incentive failure".For this reason,scholars have developed the matching logic of channel incentive,but the theoretical research of matching logic is still in the early stage of research,with research defects.First,there are still a number of important motivational categories that are not fully addressed in interorganizational contexts,such as the behavioral and outcome-based incentives in this article.Second,there may be differences in the boundary conditions under which different types of channel incentive play a role.The existence of channel policy factors and channel relationship factors concerned in this paper is likely to enhance or weaken the effect of channel incentive,but no scholars have fully studied this issue.In this paper,based on the principal-agent theory and incentive theory,we empirically tested influence of two types of incentives on dealers' opportunistic behaviors,and moderating effect of channel relationship factors(measured by immediacy of incentive)and channel policy factors(measured by immediacy of incentive),so as to answer the differences in nature of outcome-based and behavior-based channel incentives and boundary conditions of their functions.This paper makes up the research gap and further develops and deepens the matching logic of channel incentive.By regression analysis of 202 valid questionnaires,the following conclusions are obtained:outcome-based incentive is negatively correlated with dealer speculation;Behavior-based incentive is negatively correlated with dealer speculation.The immediacy of incentive can enhance the negative influence of outcome-based incentives on dealers' opportunistic behaviors.The immediacy of incentive has no significant influence on the negative correlation between the behavior-based incentive and the dealer's opportunistic behaviors.Dealer dependence can enhance the negative influence of behavior-based incentive on dealers' opportunistic behaviors;Dealer dependence has no significant impact the negative correlation between dealer dependency on outcome-based incentives and dealers' opportunistic behaviors.The theoretical contribution of this paper is as follows:firstly,this paper analyzes the connotation of outcome-based channel incentive and behavior-based channel incentive for the first time and empirically tests their effect in interorganizational situations.Secondly,the research in this paper shows that inorder to make channel excitation better play its control effect,the applicable bounday conditions of different channel excitation types need to be considered.In addition,this paper examines and develops the matching logic of channel incentives in the marketing context of China,which has certain guiding significance for the subsequent theoretical research in China.