The Strategic Dynamics of B2B Feedback: Asset Characteristics, Capabilities and Values across Supplier–Customer Relationships [before doctoral defense]

Kivonat, rövid leírás

Feedback is one of the central mechanisms through which organizations learn, adapt, and create value together with their partners. Yet it has been studied almost exclusively in consumer markets, even though business-to-business relationships work differently: the stakes are higher, the time horizons longer, and the exchange is shaped by dependency, power asymmetry, and knowledge that is difficult to access and to interpret. This dissertation therefore asks how feedback is generated, interpreted, and acted upon in regulated B2B markets, and how its drivers and processes shape its value-creating consequences. The empirical setting is the Eastern European medical device and pharmaceutical trade, a market in which feedback carries not only commercial but also regulatory and compliance weight. The dissertation answers this question through three complementary studies and a cross-study comparison. A systematic review of 73 peer-reviewed articles published between 2004 and 2023 shows that feedback research is overwhelmingly consumer-oriented, predominantly quantitative, and built mainly on Social Exchange Theory, leaving B2B feedback largely untheorized. Two qualitative studies then examine both sides of the same exchange: seven supplier firms as receivers of feedback and six customer firms as providers of it, analyzed through a hybrid inductive–deductive coding strategy grounded in the Resource-Based View and Social Exchange Theory. The findings show that feedback is not a single message but a bundle of asset characteristics — value, depth, quantity, quality, sharedness, diversity, tacitness, and authenticity — mobilized through distinct dynamic capabilities on each side of the relationship. Authenticity emerges as a previously unrecognized characteristic, with a taxonomy ranging from candid feedback to strategic misrepresentation. Suppliers and customers also value feedback asymmetrically: both recognize economic, relational, informational, social, and reciprocal value, but only suppliers report emotional and fairness value, and customers systematically underestimate what their feedback sets in motion inside supplier organizations. Taken together, the studies produce an integrated model in which feedback functions as a capability system and a value-creation process embedded in industrial relationships, rather than as a simple exchange of information. The dissertation extends the Resource-Based View and Social Exchange Theory, opens the field to perspectives not yet applied to feedback, and contributes methodologically by capturing both sides of an exchange that qualitative research usually observes from one side only. For practitioners, it offers guidance on designing feedback systems that strengthen rather than erode relationships.