This paper considers a buyer who has to decide whether to select a single or two sources of supply for a homogeneous product. The production processes of the suppliers are subject to learning effects, which reduce the production costs and increase the production capacities of the suppliers. This, in turn, enables the suppliers to reduce the sales price, which results in lower acquisition costs ...

A global economy and rapidly-changing market conditions have greatly intensified industry competition. This, in turn, has led to an ever-increasing level of outsourcing/offshoring activities by firms in order to gain cost advantage and market share (Friedman 2005, Hausman et al. 2005). According to the Department of Commerce (2006), typical U.S. manufacturers spend more than half of their reven...

The aim of this research project is the evaluation of performance in buyer-supplier relationships through the measurement of intensity and effectiveness of information flows occurring between two or more actors involved in a supply chain. It is grounded in the assumption that gradual increments of the information sharing produce positive increase in the local and global performance of the suppl...

Previous studies in the issue of inventory models with imperfect quality assumed the defectives could be sold in a batch by the end of the inspection process and the manufacturing systems were push systems. However, the above assumptions may not be true in the pull system in which buyer is powerful. Therefore, in this paper, we develop a new inventory model for items with imperfect quality and ...

Appropriate deployment of web-enabled technologies is recognised as one of the main challenges facing firms, especially within the business-to-business environment. This paper shows how judgemental modelling can help to assess facets of a firm's existing buyer-supplier relationships and the potential effects of adopting e-commerce within a firm's supply chain. The research is based on a case st...

This paper investigates the structure and evolution of customer-supplier networks in Japan using a unique dataset that contains information on customer and supplier linkages for over 500,000 incorporated non-financial firms for the five years from 2008 to 2012. We find, first, that the number of customer links is unequal across firms: the customer link distribution has a power-law tail with an ...

This paper proposes a new method for selecting appropriate buyer-supplier relationships (BSR) for specific projects. Because it is almost impossible in reality to establish mathematical relationships between the BSR attributes and the factors of a project, the concept of relationship indices (RI) is introduced to quantify such BS relationships which are in turn established through design of exp...