The authors develop a contingency paradigm involving two situational factors (the nature of the buying task and the degree of perceived risk) to explain the predictive abilities of seven formal models of group choice and to see how the mechanism of buying center choice is affected by situational factors. In an empirical test of the models and the paradigm involving 104 procurement decisions made by buying centers, they found that the paradigm does significantly better than any single model in terms of predicting group choice. The contingency paradigm predicted accurately in 49% of the cases whereas the best alternative single model predicted correctly in only 20% of the cases. The results provide empirical support for several propositions in the organizational buying behavior literature.
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