Bandwidth gains achieved in telecommunication technology have been followed by a recent proliferation of Intelligent Agents on the internet. Intelligent agents have emerged as mechanisms that aid both buyers and sellers in very different ways. It has been observed by several researchers that electronic search mechanisms promote "frictionless" competitive markets that lower buyers' search costs ...

The research questions addressed in this study are: (a) to what extent do quality practices impact upon the various dimensions of quality performance and in turn, business performance? (b) to what extent is the relationship between quality practices and quality performance contingent upon the nature of buyer-supplier relationships? We undertook comprehensive reviews of the literature in the dom...

In certain interorganizational system (IOS) adoptions, IOS initiators have incentives to exploit the full benefit to their trading partners once the partners implement the IOS. This is termed ex post opportunistic behavior on the part of the initiator. The anticipated ex post opportunistic behavior of the initiator can deter the trading partner’s ex ante IOS adoption decision, which prevents th...

While cooperative buyer-supplier relations are an important source of sustainable competitive advantage, non-cooperative behavior persists widely. This paper tests a model incorporating non-cooperative behavior within a context of formal commitment, using data from the US auto industry. This ‘close, but adversarial’ model appears to be reasonably well supported by the data, suggesting that even...

In our research, we study the case of a pulp and paper producer who decides to establish a partnership with one buyer. Using two different types of relationship, namely a traditional system without any collaboration scheme and Collaborative Planning, Forecasting and Replenishment, we develop decision models describing the producer and the buyer planning processes. We also identify which approac...

In this paper we propose a conceptual model for e-procurement solutions for industrial services. Product-related services are of particular interest of companies and should be supported through an appropriate network strategy. However, in the service field, e-business solutions and current standards are still not or only partially considering specifications and related variables of services. We...

Automated negotiations are an active research field for many years. In negotiations, participants’ characteristics play a crucial role to the final result. The most important characteristics are the deadline and the strategy of the entities. The deadline defines the time for which each entity will participate in the negotiation while the strategy defines the proposed prices at every round. In t...

This paper reports on the research process to develop a comprehensive business process model of a dyadic relationship in the ARIEL project. The ARIEL project is an attempt to explore the relationship between business level buyer-supplier relationship management and operation level process management. The purpose of the model is to act as a decision support tool in evaluating different ways of c...