Multi-site organizations must balance conflicting forces to determine the appropriate degree of purchasing centralization for their respective supplies. The ability to garner quantity discounts represents one of the primary reasons that organizations centralize procurement. This paper provides methodologies to calculate optimal order quantities and compute total purchasing and inventory costs w...

supply chain management is a set of guidelines for integration of chains, which aims to reduce costs and increase system services to customers. one of the most important issues for supply chain stockholders is procuring and purchasing requested items in a timely manner. thus, a variety of models have been proposed as purchasing strategy in supply chains. group purchasing is a system which leads...

We consider a firm selling a fixed amount of inventory to customers who possess uncertain valuations on a product prior to purchase and realize their complete valuations only after purchase. The firm determines the returns policies over two periods; each of which targets for a group of brand loyal customers or regular shoppers. The customers are strategic, taking into account both the product a...

This paper analyzes the role of nominal assets in ranking intertemporal budget policies in a growing open economy. Budget policies are ranked in terms of the public’s intertemporal tax liability. In our small open economy model, the constraint for the valuation of private and public Þnancial assets is in terms of the exogenous foreign price level. We show that this limits, under purchasing powe...

We model the bidding for a government contract in which there is imperfect competition; each bidder is better informed about his own costs than either his rival bidders or the government; and the distribution of the domestic firms’ costs differs from the distribution of foreign firms’ costs because of comparative-advantage effects. We find that the gcyemment minimizes its expected procurement c...

In this paper, an purchasing inventory model for deteriorating items is developed with a linear, positive trend in demand, allowing inventory shortages and backlogging. It is assumed that the goods in the inventory deteriorate over time at a constant rate . Two models are developed for two operational policies. The first policy covers the case that the inventory model with linear demand for det...

Without reinforced energy saving policies, residential consumption of electricity will increase sharply over the next twenty years, in particular as a result of expected growth in the specific uses of electricity. The main problem is not a lack of energy efficient technologies, which do indeed exist for electrical appliances, but one of slow diffusion of existing technologies due to the weaknes...

Purchasing health care is at the core of the reforms of the UK NHS and yet there is little research evidence on which the policy is based. Research in this area is hampered by a lack of clarity over the aims of purchasing and the pace of change within the NHS. Purchasing developments such as general practice fund-holding are proceeding without a large scale evaluation of their impact. At a nati...

Sanderson et al’s realist review of strategic purchasing identifies insights from two strands of theory: the economics of organisation and inter-organisational relationships. Our findings from a programme of research conducted by the RESYST (Resilient and Responsive Health Systems) consortium in seven countries echo these results, and add to them the crucial area of org...