We analyze the sourcing decision of a buyer choosing between two supplier types: responsible suppliers are costly but adhere to strict social and environmental responsibility standards, while risky suppliers are less expensive but may experience responsibility violations. A segment of the consumer population, called socially conscious, is willing to pay a higher price for a product sourced from...

We study a firm’s cost-based sourcing decision of whether to invest in an incumbent supplier or switch to an alternative supplier in order to realise lower purchasing costs. In isolation, it can be shown that the development of an incumbent supplier (i.e., a cooperative investment) becomes more attractive, the higher the uncertainty about the price the buying firm can realise on the market and ...

As suppliers provide more value in today’s supply chains, eliciting supplier cost-reduction efforts and inducing supplier competition are two important levers for a buyer to reduce sourcing costs. In this paper, we study a buyer’s sourcing strategy considering supplier effort and competition. The buyer has two instruments in her strategy: the composition of the supply base and the contracting m...

Supplier selection and material procurement planning are the most important issues in supply chain management. This decision is complicated when the buyers face with discount price schemes. In real situation, each supplier may apply different methods such as different types of discount schedules and various types of payment in order to increase market share. In this situation, buyers try to sel...

We consider a supply chain in which a single supplier with fixed capacity sells to several independent retailers or manufacturers. The retailers have private information about their individual markets (e.g., mean market demand), which influences the size of their orders to the supplier. If the sum of all retailer orders exceeds the supplier’s capacity, the supplier uses a pre-declared rule, whi...

Chunk scheduling is one of the key components in P2P streaming systems. Most of previous research works focus on receiver side’s chunk/peer selection strategies and neglect the service order and available uplink bandwidth allocation problem at supplier side, which will cause the user’s video quality descending under overloaded operating environments. In this paper, we propose the supplier side ...

Supplier selection and evaluation is increasingly seen as a strategic issue for companies. Unlike the past, an emerging trend is to select suppliers where a long-term relationship is desired and supplier involvement in product development is required and to sort suppliers into categories based on performances. This paper describes a supplier evaluation and management methodology for strategic s...