| Summary: | 博士 === 國立成功大學 === 企業管理學系碩博士班 === 93 === To meet global competition, many business-to-business buyers and their sellers are changing the way they do business—moving from traditional, arm’s-length relationships to-ward closer, long-term relationships. The supplier’s willingness to make transaction-specific investments is one of the key factors when buyer faces with the choice of which suppliers to partner with. While supplier’s specificity investment is always seen as the commitments from the supplier, previous studies on this research issue are almost conducted from the buyer’s perspective. Regarding the strategic benefits which supplier’s specificity investments could bring to the supplier are limited and subject to further validation. Thus, the major concern of this study is to identify whether supplier’s specificity investments could raise the strategic benefits for suppliers.
This paper conduct a survey methodology using data from 148 exporters of the manu-facturing industries in Taiwan to test the hypotheses relating supplier firms’ specificity in-vestments to the profile of their relationship learning, competence building, and competence upgrading. The results conclude that (1) suppliers can raise relationship learning benefits by devoting specificity investments, (2) benefits of competence building as well as competence upgrading from supplier’s specificity investments are mediated by supplier’s relationship learning, (3) removing the indirect effect of relationship learning, the level of supplier’s specificity investments has negative influence on supplier’s potential of exploration, (4) con-cerning the moderating effects of relationship factors on the relationship between supplier’s specificity investments and relationship learning, the variable of norms is verified as a facili-tator to enhance the above relationship, while customer power advantage is viewed as an in-hibitor to attenuate the above relationship, and (5) regarding the moderating effects of rela-tionship factors on the relationship between supplier’s specificity investments and compe-tence building, the variable of norms is verified as an inhibitor to attenuate the competence building which is promoted by specificity investments, while customer power advantage is viewed as a facilitator to enhaance the above relationship.
These results highlight the importance of recognizing the facilitating role as well as re-straining role of supplier’s specificity investments to articulate benefits to suppliers. In addi-tion, the importance of relationship factors in promoting and hindering this exploiting process is also verified.
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