JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. American Marketing Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of Marketing.Marketing theory and practice have focused persistently on exchange between buyers and sellers. Unfortunately, most of the research and too many of the marketing strategies treat buyer-seller exchanges as discrete events, not as ongoing relationships. The authors describe a framework for developing buyerseller relationships that affords a vantage point for formulating marketing strategy and for stimulating new research directions. UMMARIZING 15 years of debate on the conceptual domain of marketing, Hunt (1983a) concludes that ". . . the primary focus of marketing is the exchange relationship" (p. 9; also see Ferber 1970; Kotler 1972; Kotler and Levy 1969; Kotler and Zaltman 1971; Luck 1969, 1974). The relative permanence of that view has been instituted by the recent theoretical advances it has fostered. Examples include Frazier's (1983a) framework for interorganizational exchange, Bagozzi's (1975, 1979) developing theory of exchange, and Weitz's (1981) contingency model of selling. Exchange also occupies a central role in the unfolding political economy framework (Achrol, Reve, and Ster 1983; Amdt 1983; Stern and Reve 1980) and a host of more specialized empirical studies. Each of the works cited relies on the notion of exchange for four key conceptual benefits. First, ex-F. Robert Dwyer is Associate Professor of Marketing and Sejo Oh is a doctoral student in marketing, University of Cincinnati. Paul H. Schurr is Associate Professor of Marketing, State University of New York, Albany. The authors thank Chuck Brunner and the JM reviewers for helpful comments on previous drafts. Partial funding for this research was provided by the College of Business Administration, University of Cincinnati.change serves as a focal event between two or more parties. Second, exchange provides an important frame of reference for identifying the social network of individuals and institutions that participate in its formation and execution. Third, it affords the opportunity to examine the domain of objects or psychic entities that get transferred. Finally, and most important, as a critical event in the marketplace it allows the careful study of antecedent conditions and processes for buyerseller exchange.Despite the importance generally ascribed to the idea of exchange, marketing research has largely neglected the relationship aspect of buyer-seller behavior while tending to study transactions as discrete events. The lack of attention to antecedent conditions and processes for buyer-seller exchange relationships is a serious omission in the development of marketing knowledge.Ongoi...

Marketing theory and practice have focused persistently on exchange between buyers and sellers. Unfortunately, most of the research and too many of the marketing strategies treat buyer-seller exchanges as discrete events, not as ongoing relationships. The authors describe a framework for developing buyer-seller relationships that affords a vantage point for formulating marketing strategy and for stimulating new research directions.

Exchange theories posit that trust has an important and favorable influence on dyadic interactions. This paper examines the notion that trust plays a key role in making a seller's tough bargaining strategy successful. In a bargaining experiment, we manipulated subjects' preconceptions about a seller's trustworthiness and bargaining toughness. As hypothesized, a seller's expected trustworthiness-plustoughness in bargaining led to higher levels of buyer-seller cooperation and agreement and a higher level of buyer concessions. F rom Alderson's marketing-as-negotiation concept (1957) to Bagozzi's marketing-as-exchange perspective (1975), the process of buyer-seller interactions has been emphasized as a key feature of consumer or buyer transactions. One approach to illuminating the process of buyer-seller interactions in both consumer and industrial studies requires an examination of negotiation behavior (e.g., Clopton 1984; Dwyer and Walker 1981; Johnston and Bonoma 1984; Mathews, Wilson, and Monoky 1972; Walker 1971). Reingen and Woodside (1981) identify three exchange issues that deserve special attention in interaction-process studies such as bargaining experiments: (1) what happens during communication processes, (2) how do antecedent variables affect communication processes, and (3) what persuasion strategies are useful in influencing buyer-seller interactions. Accordingly, this paper examines buyer-seller communication and concession-making processes as influenced by a buyer's prior beliefs about a seller's trustworthiness and bargaining toughness.Unfortunately, consumer research has devoted little attention to the influence of trust on cooperation, agreement, or bargaining toughness (i.e., unyielding behavior) as a persuasive strategy in buyer-seller transactions. This is surprising, since theories of dyadic