A Dyadic Research Program: The Interaction Possibility Model

Chris Medlin and Christopher J.

This paper was published in Journal of Business-to-business Marketing.

To be published late 2003

Different forms of interaction between firms are at the heart of a relationship and network perspective of business-to-business markets. This paper presents a dyadic research program based upon an Interaction Possibility Space, defined by the interactions between firms using potentially different coordination modes. That firms may have different perspectives of their preferred coordination mode opens two areas of research. First, how does interaction proceed when both parties have similar views of coordination modes? Second, how does interaction proceed when parties have dissimilar views of their coordination modes? Such research necessarily requires dyadic studies and furthermore, for quantitative research, requires the development of clusterwise regression methodologies capable of examining dyadic data. Keywords: Business Dyads, Levels, Interaction, Clusterwise Regression