Our interest in Markov strategies is motivated by our interest in industries in which all players behave opportunistically at any point in time. At the same time, we assumed that the buyer is committed to a negotiating culture. We discuss in this subsection why a commitment to a negotiating culture is not essential for our results and what happens when we drop the Markov assumption.
Endogenou culture choice. In practice, a change in the negotiating culture seems to be possible but very expensive. We consider now an extension of our theoretical model in which this possibility is included. The state variable describes the prevailing negotiating culture apart from the roles of the suppliers. Each procurement cycle starts with an additional stage.