Developing and Testing a Contingency Paradigm of Group Choice in Organizational Buying

The outhors develop a contingency pclrodigm 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 ree how the mechanism of buying center choice is affected by situation01 foctors. In an empirical test of the mcdels and the paradigm involving 104 procurement decisions made by buying centers, they found that the paradigm dms significantly better than any single model in terms of predicting group choice. The contingency paradigm predicted accurately in 49% of the cases whereas the bast olternotive single model predicted correctly in only 20% of the cases. The results provide empirical suppart for several p rop asitions in the organizational buying behavior literoture.