Through the construct of supplier satisfaction, recent research explains the supplier's preferred treatment of a given customer. This cause-and-effect phenomenon is often not contrasted with other reasons or controlled for. This work addresses this issue and uses two tactics to elaborate upon social exchange theory, namely, construct splitting and construct contrasting, to analyse the development of preferential customer treatment. For this purpose, a structural equation model is used with data from the international automotive industry. The results extend the breadth of constructs explaining preferred customer treatment (PCT) and challenge the existing reasoning by questioning the relative importance of supplier satisfaction. While supplier satisfaction does affect PCT, the relative supplier satisfaction defined as a comparison of outcomes between the actual and the best alternative business relationships influences PCT much more.

Furthermore, by distinguishing between the economic and non-economic dimensions of supplier satisfaction, the study indicate that economic satisfaction has a higher influence on the relative satisfaction whereas social satisfaction a higher one on absolute supplier satisfaction.

These findings imply that despite the current debate about the importance of behavioural constructs such as supplier interaction and social capital, supplier resource allocation decisions are actually dominated by economic and relative aspects of satisfaction. This outcome calls for a more economically driven debate about behavioural supply management approaches.

通过构建供应商满意度，最近的研究解释了供应商对给定客户的首选待遇。这种因果现象通常不会与其他原因形成对照或得到控制。这项工作解决了这个问题，并使用两种策略来阐述社会交换理论，即构造分裂和构造对比，以分析优惠客户待遇的发展。为此，将结构方程模型与来自国际汽车行业的数据一起使用。结果扩展了解释首选客户待遇（PCT）的结构的广度，并通过质疑供应商满意度的相对重要性来挑战现有的推理方法。尽管供应商的满意度确实会影响PCT，

此外，通过区分供应商满意度的经济和非经济维度，研究表明，经济满意度对相对满意度的影响较大，而社会满意度对绝对供应商满意度的影响较高。

这些发现暗示着，尽管当前就诸如供应商互动和社会资本之类的行为构造的重要性争论不休，但供应商资源分配决策实际上还是由满意度的经济和相关方面所决定。这一结果要求就行为供应管理方法进行更经济的辩论。