| "Customers are fundamentally changing the dynamics of the marketplace. The market has become a forum in which consumers play an active role in creating and competing for value" (Prahalad and Ramaswamy 2000, p.80). Due to the importance of customer participation, this dissertation contributes to the literature in several ways.; First, this dissertation conceptualizes and further develops scales to measure customer participation in a business-to-business context. This dissertation suggests that customer participation is a second-order construct with four first order dimensions: formalization, comprehensiveness, long-term orientation, and importance. Second, drawing upon different theoretical frameworks such as transaction cost theory, resource based view, power-dependence, and equity theory, this dissertation proposes and tests a model of how customer participation in the business-to-business context contributes to the product value obtained by customers in the relationship. Particularly, this dissertation suggests that product value obtained by customers is driven by two value-related activities: product value creation and value sharing activities between customers and suppliers. |
