In the rush to open their website, e-commerce sites too often fail to support buyer decision making and search, resulting in a loss of sale and the customer’s repeat business. This paper reviews why this occurs and the failure of many B2C and B2B website executives to understand that appropriate decision support and search technology can’t be fully bought off-the-shelf. Our contention is that s...

The recent emergence of internet-based electronic market places is changing the structure of traditional marketing channels in a fundamental way. Collaboration may increase because of lower transaction costs related with increased information availability. At the same time these same factors, through the effect they have on mutual dependency and uncertainty in the buyer-seller dyad, are conside...

The mainstream view holds that over time buyer–supplier relationships evolve through a number of phases. As a consequence, supplier development as a buyer–supplier relationship management practice should also be adapted to the life-cycle phase. Supplier development activities matching the buyer– supplier relationship life-cycle phase will lead to more favorable performance improvements. However...

We compare buyer-supplier links established by pairs of Japanese-owned automobile assemblers and component manufacturers operating in Japan and in North America during 198%90. Eight assemblers and more than I70 Japanese component manufacturers had established North American manufacturing facilities. In total, Japanese automobile assembly organizations operating in North America had recreated ab...

We consider a single buyer who wishes to outsource a fixed demand for a manufactured good or service at a fixed price to a set of potential suppliers. We examine the value of competition as a mechanism for the buyer to elicit service quality from the suppliers. We compare two approaches the buyer could use to orchestrate this competition: (1) a Supplier-Allocation (SA) approach, which allocates...

We consider the problem of a single seller repeatedly selling a single item to a single buyer (specifically, the buyer has a value drawn fresh from known distribution D in every round). Prior work assumes that the buyer is fully rational and will perfectly reason about how their bids today affect the seller’s decisions tomorrow. In this work we initiate a different direction: the buyer simply r...

We study the efficient allocation of a single object over a finite time horizon. Buyers arrive randomly over time, are long-lived and have independent private values. The valuation of a buyer may depend on the time of the allocation in an arbitrary way. We construct an incentive compatible mechanism in which (A) there is a single financial transaction (with the buyer), (B) ex-post participation...

We analyze the effect of buyer, contract, and vendor characteristics on abnormal stock returns among firms that have announced large scale Information Technology (IT) and Business Process outsourcing (BPO) contracts. We draw upon a comprehensive dataset on outsourcing announcements, augmented with data from public sources. Salient buyer factors examined include use of a wide range of organizati...

I consider an alternating offer bargaining game which is played by a risk neutral buyer and seller, where the value of the good to be traded follows a Markov process. For these games the existence of a perfect equilibrium is proved and the set of equilibrium payoffs and strategies are characterised. The main results are: (a) If the buyer is less patient than the seller, then there will be delay...