As manufacturing firms increasingly realize that supplier performance is crucial to their establishing and maintaining competitive advantage, supplier development has been a subject of considerable research in supply chain management. We develop and test a path model to explore how supplier development practices affect buyer–supplier performance from the buying firm’s perspective in the context...

We study the structure of an optimal management for innovative activities. The top management of a buyer hires a supplier for production. The production e¢ ciency can be enhanced by investing in R&D before production. The buyer chooses between using its own subunit for the R&D, or outsourcing the task to the supplier (integration of R&D and production). Our analysis reveals that (i) when the R&...

Many researchers have called for the need to improve the understanding of the concept and working of supply chain visibility. The facilitating role of inter-organizational information systems (IOIS) in achieving SC visibility has received inadequate research attention. This paper is to elaborate on the novel concept of IOIS visibility and to look into the antecedents and consequences of IOIS vi...

E−markets have been established in many industries as a sourcing option for buyers, yet in many situations they are used to complement long−term supplier−buyer relationships rather than replacing them. In this paper, we analyze the complementary role of e−markets when the buyer uses e−markets as an outside option in bargaining with the traditional supplier. The supplier may choose to make a rel...

Manufacturing firms are increasingly seeking cost and other competitive advantages by tightly coupling and managing their relationship with suppliers. Among other mechanisms, interorganizational systems (IOS) that facilitate boundary-spanning activities of a firm enable them to effectively manage different types of buyer–supplier relationships. This study integrates literature from the operatio...

We investigate the role of options (contingent claims) in a buyer-supplier system. Specifically using a two-period model with correlated demand, we illustrate how options provide flexibility to a buyer to respond to market changes in the second period. We also study the implications of such arrangements between a buyer and a supplier for coordination of the channel. We show that, in general, ch...

Business groups are important sources of innovation in emerging economies, but there is substantial heterogeneity in the extent of innovative activity by groups, both across groups and over time. Variation in the density of intra-group buyer-supplier ties that are common linkages among group affiliates may help explain the heterogeneity. Buyer-supplier ties create benefits for group innovativen...

In the global supply chain where there is a time lag between arrival of the shipment and the sale, the purchase price to the buyer may, on the day of settlement be different from that on the day of the order if the buyer is to pay in the supplier’s currency. Either the supplier or the buyer is exposed to the loss due to exchange rate fluctuations. The key questions that arise then are: Does it ...

E-commerce demands that IT managers pay just as close attention to business issues as to technical ones. What are the company’s goals for the B2B E-commerce marketplace? What are the volume and size of the buyer–supplier transactions? How unique and complex are the buyer–supplier interaction processes in the firm? These are some of the key business questions IT managers must be able to answer. ...

Supply networks rely increasingly on dynamic information flow between organisations. Providing intelligent automated collaboration requires learning capability i.e. an agent should be capable of adapting behaviour as conditions change. This paper proposes a scalable multi-agent system which uses case-based reasoning as a framework for part of its intelligence. Agents operate at two levels: an i...