University of Zagreb research grant: Determining the organizational buyer’s purchasing decision-making styles in choosing a service

Grant holder: The Faculty of Economics and Business University of Zagreb
Duration: June, 2017 – December, 2017
Collaborator: Edo Rajh


The consumer behavior area is greatly concerned with studying decision-making in individual buyer’s purchases. For example, there are papers that analyze phases of individual buyer’s decision processes, their perception of risk and the value of a particular purchase, or differences in decision styles with regard to the type of shop, type of purchase, and socio-cultural specificity of individual countries. Contrary to that, the area of organizational buyers’ behavior, as a part of marketing at business markets, is characterized by the lack of such research. The basic scientific papers written on this subject date from the 60s and the 70s of the last century (for example, Robinson, Faris and Wind, 1967; Bonoma and Zaltman, 1978; Corey, 1978; Wind and Yoram, 1978) after which there hadn’t been any significant contributions for almost twenty years.
The proposed research is a continuation of the research carried out in 2014 (under University research grants 2), which determined the decision-making style of purchasing products from Croatian manufacturing companies and whose results were successfully published in Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing. The research will include the development of a methodology for assessing the style of decision-making of organizational buyers in purchasing of services.