This paper presents a framework of buyer–supplier relationships used in an empirical study to investigate how the development of more collaborative relationships between UK retailers and freshproduce suppliers affects the financial performance of suppliers in such relationships. Relationships between key partnership characteristics and performance are discussed and empirically tested. In additi...

This paper develops a model for illustrating how to use quantity discount policy to achieve supply chain coordination. A supplier–buyer system selling one type of product with multi-period and probabilistic customer demand is considered. We first show that if both the buyer and supplier can find a coordination mechanism to make joint decisions, the joint profit in this situation is more than th...

Functional relationship between supplier and buyer in an open market place leads to investigate the role of both quantifiable and non-quantifiable parameters in coordination mechanism with the aim of achieving higher performance in supply chain activities. Here, we develop a supply chain model and a new agent to analyze and simulate the players’ behavior in the network. A cooperative game theor...

The outsourcing of Information Technology (IT) services is a practice generally regulated by contracts. Since contracts are inevitably incomplete, buyer-supplier relationships are usually managed by additional mechanisms of incentives and governance, which results in a variety of success levels. Buyer perceived volatility and ambiguity of the future relationship are argued to be keys in definin...

The literature offers little empiric evidence on the role of management accounting in inter-firm relationships. So, in the following research, we examined the effect of the use of a set of new management accounting practices namely the ABC, the balanced scorecard and the financial and accounting benchmarking as well as the effect of the investment in information and communication technologies (...

Focusing on long-term buyer–supplier relationships, this article addresses two questions: (1) What are the antecedents that lead to the adoption of formal control, social control, or both? (2)What is the nature of the relationship between formal control and social control are they substitutes or complements?We develop amodel to investigate the impact of the length of cooperation and institution...

This paper investigates how the formation of larger buyers affects a supplier’s profits and, by doing so, his incentives to undertake non-contractible activities. We first identify two channels of buyer power, which allows larger buyers to obtain discounts. We subsequently examine the effects of buyer power on the supplier’s incentives and on social welfare. Contrary to some informal claims in ...

This study investigates the relationships between U.S. buying firms’ supplier development efforts, commitment, social capital accumulation with key suppliers, and buying firm performance. We identify linkages between supply chain management research on supplier development and organization theory research on social capital to consider how buying firm commitment to a long-term relationship, cogn...

We develop a new theory of supplier diversification based on buyer risk. When suppliers are subject to the risk of buyer default, buyers may take costly action to signal creditworthiness so as to obtain more favorable terms. But once signaling costs are sunk, buyers sourcing from a single supplier become vulnerable to future holdup. Although ex ante supply base diversification can be effective ...

The theory of incomplete contracts has been used to study the relationship between buyers and suppliers following the deployment of modern information technology to facilitate coordination between them. Previous research has sought to explain anecdotal evidence from some industries on the recent reduction in the number of suppliers selected to do business with buyers, by appealing to relationsh...