In evaluating suppliers in complex purchasing decisions involving
customized solutions, purchasing managers must judge the capabilities
suppliers have to provide the solutions, a judgment that often includes
considerable uncertainty. To reduce this uncertainty, suppliers often
ask their existing customers to be reference customers and give a
referral to purchasing managers - that is, suppliers and purchasing
managers consider a supplier-selected referral as a source of
information. However, in contrast to other information sources,
reference customers are selected by suppliers, not by purchasing
managers; thus, purchasing managers may perceive a bias in the
supplier-selected referral. We study the antecedents of purchasing
managers' perceived bias with a mixed-design experiment with purchasing
managers as respondents. We find that the greater the experience of
purchasing managers, the less the bias in the referral they perceive. We
also find that reference customers can reduce purchasing managers'
perceived bias in the supplier-selected referral by giving a referral
that has some negative information in an otherwise positive referral.
[PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]