All resources need to be managed to realize opportunities. Isolating the benefits of Information Technology and relating them to the associated costs has proved elusive and threatened emerging opportunities. A change of approach has been advocated to overcome these problems which focuses on the Total Cost of Ownership. Over the past several years, the Total Cost of Ownership has been both haile...

We study the interaction between the seller of a product, the buyers who are uncertain about the product quality and a rating agency who observes the quality and sends signals about it. Assuming the seller-pays model of rating agency, we analyze the cases in which the payment to the rater is publicly disclosed and fixed, publicly disclosed and rating-contingent, private and rating-contingent. F...

Purchasing and supply leaders continually search for ways to improve the quality, delivery, and cost of production inputs. Their participation in these proactive supply chain activities can be a significant driver of purchasing and supply management’s use of information technology (IT). Using a transaction cost analysis perspective, we surveyed purchasing and supply professionals at the directo...

Critics of current tying doctrine argue that metering ties can increase consumer welfare and total welfare without increasing output and that they generally increase both welfare measures. Contrary to those claims, we prove that metering ties always lower both consumer welfare and total welfare unless they increase capital good output. We further show that under market conditions we argue are r...

Supply chain is an accepted way of remaining in the competition in today's rapidly changing market. This paper presents a coordinated seller-buyer supply chain model in two stages, which is called Joint Economic Lot Sizing (JELS) in literature. The delivery activities in the supply chain consist of a single raw material. We assume that the delivery lead time is stochastic and follows an exponen...

In this paper, seller-buyer supply chain coordination with general side-payment contracts is introduced to gain the maximum possible chain profit. In our model, the logistics costs for both buyer and seller are considered and the final demand is also supposed to be a decreasing function of the retail price. Since parties aim to maximize their individual profits, the contractual parameters are s...

We give a new approach in modeling the incomplete information in a buyer-seller game. We assume that the seller does not know the buyer's utility function at all. Usually the problem is solved by determining the Bayesian Nash equilibrium of the game, where it is assumed that the buyer's utility function has only some parameters unknown to the seller, and the seller knows the distribution of the...

Although set-up costs are prevalent and substantial in natural resource extraction, their analysis in decentralized markets is difficult. In particular, it is known that a Walrasian competitive equilibrium cannot exist in simple extraction models with set-up costs thus rendering standard competitive equilibrium analysis inapplicable. However, this paper demonstrates that this result is sensitiv...