تاثیر شهرت بر انتخاب تامین کننده: مطالعه تجربی صنعت خودرو اروپایی The influence of reputation on supplier selection: An empirical study of the European automotive industry

1. Introduction Supplier selection and supply chain restructuring are two related phenomenon (Schniederjans et al., 2015) that strongly influence the automotive industry (Choi and Hong, 2002). In the automotive sector, with its traditionally flat hierarchy, price was the main selection criterion (Fujimoto, 2001) but, gradually, other supplier selection criteria such as quality and technical capabilities (Birchall et al., 2001; Calabrese, 2001) have been considered more consistently (Choi and Hartley, 1996). Consequently, a real hierarchy among direct and indirect suppliers has been defined (Balcet and Consoni, 2007; Castelli et al., 2011) with a growing involvement of specialised suppliers to satisfy new requirements (Caputo and Zirpoli, 2001; Sturgeon and Van Biesebroeck, 2011) and with many minor firms relegated to the role of sub-suppliers (Rachid, 2001; Volpato and Stocchetti, 2007). Two main consequences arise in the car components market: the reduction in the number of suppliers to the point of scarcity (Schiele et al., 2012), and the increasing power the so-called mega-suppliers (Chanaron, 2013; Frigant, 2013), as compared to carmakers. These firms are able to combine technical skills and logistical capabilities, as well as financial strength, good reputation and managerial competences, which are essential aspects for maintaining reliable and longterm relationship with carmakers (Cheraghi et al., 2004; Karlsson and Weimarck, 2001). There is plenty of normative literature on how buyers should select their suppliers, with a general consensus on a number of factors influencing the individual choice, ranging from price, perceived quality, delivery to other more industry specific criteria, as documented by Lin and Purchase (2006). Reputational issues receive little attention in this body of work, as already highlighted by de Boer et al. (2001). Even in the presence of relevant phenomenon like competition, globalisation and the Internet boom, most recent – and not so recent – supplier rankings (Cheraghi et al., 2004; Karsak and Dursun, 2016) continue to be mainly based on general performance evaluation. In fact, there is little literature on how buyers actually select their suppliers in practice. This paper is exactly focused on this point and analyses a database of real sourcing decisions in the automotive sector. We contribute to the literature by providing an extensive quantitative analysis of the supplier selection criteria based on contracts for components for all car models assembled in European plants during the period 2002–2014. Moreover, we investigate the effect of reputation in the purchasing decision by including different indicators of corporate reputation, defined as the “perceptual representation of firm’s overall appeal to all of its key stakeholders when compared with other leading rivals” (Fombrun, 1996), within our econometric estimates. We find two intriguing and promising results. First, suppliers that serve a diversified customer portfolio have a better chance to gain additional orders and further broaden their customer base, compared to suppliers that serve particular customers. Second, suppliers with strong exposure to premium brand customers gain more orders also from nonpremium customers in the subsequent period. For the automotive supply chain, these results connect to the customer attractiveness literature, and to social exchange theory. The former argues that buying firms may want to become a preferred customer of their suppliers; hence also buyers have to build their attractiveness and their reputation in the supply market.