5. Conclusions, consequences and limitations
Despite a vast managerial and descriptive literature on the issue of supplier selection mechanism, mainly focused on the drivers and consequences of individual choices, empirical analyses using real ex-post data are scarce. Furthermore, this is true for studies that include also reputation as one of the most important issue considered. Our contribution adds new empirical evidence by investigating the influence of corporate reputational factors among the most relevant supplier selection criteria.
In doing so, we use an original database merging information from the web with information on actual supplying contracts among carmakers and producer of components for each new car model assembled in Europe during the period 2002–2014. We consider all purchasing decision taken after 2011, and we analyse how they were influenced by the first available period.
Some limitations arise in our empirical strategy, for both industry specificity and for the nature of the data used, where relational capabilities, investment, trust and other important aspects cannot be considered. Nothing can be said about monetary value or real physical quantities involved, i.e. in term of the number of components for each contract, and these are important limitations of this study.
