Price Sensitivity and Customer Perceived Switching Costs in Business-to-Business Markets: Joint Effect on Customer Repurchase Intentions

Previous research assumes an unconditionally positive association of perceived switching costs — financial, procedural and relational — with repurchase intentions. The authors theorize that price sensitivity differentially moderates the relationship of repurchase intentions with three different types of switching costs — financial, procedural and relational. Using a large-scale dataset (N=8,588) spanning multiple industries in the business-to-business domain, the authors show that price sensitivity moderates these associations such that: (1) the association of financial switching costs and procedural switching costs with repurchase intention is stronger when price sensitivity is low and (2) the association of relational switching costs with repurchase intentions is stronger when price sensitivity is high.