Contextualizing negotiation research: The unique dynamics of buyer-supplier negotiations

Effective buyer-supplier negotiations are important for organizations to attain their goals and for wider society to have a reliable supply of goods and services. These negotiations also have distinctive characteristics that differentiate them from other negotiation settings, such as personal buyer-seller negotiations, which have attracted much of the attention in the negotiation literature. Given the differences between professional buyer-supplier and personal buyer-seller negotiations, some findings from personal negotiations may have limited applicability in supply chain settings, while others hold across contexts. These findings have important implications for both negotiation research and education, calling for careful contextualization based on the type of negotiation. By reviewing recent studies in the supply chain management literature, this article highlights several common dynamics of buyer-supplier negotiations and how they affect negotiation outcomes. These dynamics are broadly categorized into the non-exhaustive themes of power in ongoing buyer-supplier relationships, other relational factors (supply network complexity, cross-cultural relations, and AI adoption), and negotiation strategies in buyer-supplier relationships (distributive, integrative, and mixed strategies), providing scholars with an overview of selected recent research on buyer-supplier negotiations.