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informative for firms with sticky cost structure. Weiss’s findings suggest that firms’ cost
behaviors affect analyst forecast accuracy and coverage and thus capital market.
2.2 Literature Review on Customer Concentration
Ou, Lee, Cho, and Lin (2016) document that customers’ order size, order amount,
and new product purchase rate are positively and significantly associated with customer
profit contribution. Jen and Chen (2007) also suggest that suppliers have to also evaluate
individual customer value rather than just the average of the total customers, suggesting
that customer-supplier relationship is a key driver of the supplier’s profits. One important
concept that capture customer-supplier relationship is customer concentration which is
defined as the relative size of customers that adds to a firm's revenue. A firm exhibits high
level of customer-based concentration when its revenue is largely contributed by its major
customer.
From the view of customer-supplier relationship, two types of interdependence affect
the relationship: (1) dependence asymmetry and (2) mutual dependence (Gulati and Sytch,
2007). The conventional view on customer concentration focuses on dependence
asymmetry. Galbraith (1952) provides a tactic for customer to exercise their power to their
suppliers by keeping the suppliers in uncertainty. Suppliers often invest resources to meet
major customer's demand, while major customers can switch their order to other suppliers.
Thus, suppliers are usually more dependent on major customers. Using Taiwan OEM
suppliers as an example, Kang and Seetoo (2007) demonstrate that suppliers even have to
use risky unilateral relation-specific investments as a hostage to obtain customers’ orders
and long-term cooperation. In contrast, mutual dependence suggests that customer and
supplier are dependent on each other. The dependence is especially higher when suppliers
sell highly specialized products. For example, inter-organizational systems between
customers and supplies are usually build to facilitate information sharing and sustain
mutual dependence (Chang, 2010). The commonly-adopted corporation mechanisms such
as Continuous Replenishment Planning (CRP) and Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) can
result in lower cost and lower order variability for suppliers than that without coordination
mechanism (Guo, Chiang, Liu, and Liou, 2002). Mutual dependence makes the cost of
changing supplier/customer more expensive for both parties. Cool and Henderson (1998),
using French manufacturing data, show that buyer power explains a much larger
percentage of the variance in the seller’s profitability than supplier (seller) power. They
argue that the power in supply chain may come from the relative degree of concentration