Price negotiations are the primary form of price determination in the B2B context. In this context, the price defence of sales staff has a significant impact on short-term company profits. Granting discounts is thus a risky decision for salespeople: a low purchase price can substantially reduce the company's profit, but at the same time favour the closing of sales. Given the important role of risk trade-offs in price negotiations, an important research gap is whether and how firm-level risk affinity (e.g., willingness to invest resources in projects with uncertain returns) affects salespeople's price defence.
Based on cross-industry surveys and an online experiment with B2B salespeople, Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. Homburg, Dr. Robin-Christopher Ruhnau and Stefan Hartmann investigate the extent to which a company's strategic risk appetite affects the price negotiations of sales staff and how companies can moderate this relationship.
Further information can be found here: www.bwl.uni-mannheim.de/imu/veroeffentlichungen/research-insights/
