A Meta-Analysis of Power in Buyer-Seller Relationships: An Abstract

The drive among business partners to secure resources is one of the very reasons for establishing relationships between buyers and sellers. Inevitably, the web of interdependencies in which they are caught gives rise to power, whereby one party tries to control the behavior of the other. This pivotal role of power in buyer-seller relationships has attracted the attention of many scholars since the early 1970s. Despite a sizeable amount of research produced on the subject, it has been described as too scattered, fragmented, and non-programmatic to yield a clear picture. As a response, we aim to provide such a holistic picture by identifying, synthesizing, and evaluating the antecedents and outcomes of exercised power in buyer-seller relationships, based on a meta-analysis of extant empirical research.