Manufacturing firms are increasingly seeking cost and other competitive advantages by tightly coupling and managing their relationship with suppliers. Among other mechanisms, interorganizational systems (IOS) that facilitate boundary-spanning activities of a firm enable them to effectively manage different types of buyer–supplier relationships. This study integrates literature from the operatio...

We investigate the role of options (contingent claims) in a buyer-supplier system. Specifically using a two-period model with correlated demand, we illustrate how options provide flexibility to a buyer to respond to market changes in the second period. We also study the implications of such arrangements between a buyer and a supplier for coordination of the channel. We show that, in general, ch...

Business groups are important sources of innovation in emerging economies, but there is substantial heterogeneity in the extent of innovative activity by groups, both across groups and over time. Variation in the density of intra-group buyer-supplier ties that are common linkages among group affiliates may help explain the heterogeneity. Buyer-supplier ties create benefits for group innovativen...

In the global supply chain where there is a time lag between arrival of the shipment and the sale, the purchase price to the buyer may, on the day of settlement be different from that on the day of the order if the buyer is to pay in the supplier’s currency. Either the supplier or the buyer is exposed to the loss due to exchange rate fluctuations. The key questions that arise then are: Does it ...

E-commerce demands that IT managers pay just as close attention to business issues as to technical ones. What are the company’s goals for the B2B E-commerce marketplace? What are the volume and size of the buyer–supplier transactions? How unique and complex are the buyer–supplier interaction processes in the firm? These are some of the key business questions IT managers must be able to answer. ...

Supply networks rely increasingly on dynamic information flow between organisations. Providing intelligent automated collaboration requires learning capability i.e. an agent should be capable of adapting behaviour as conditions change. This paper proposes a scalable multi-agent system which uses case-based reasoning as a framework for part of its intelligence. Agents operate at two levels: an i...

Complex social networks have received increasing attention from researchers. Recent work has focused on mechanisms that produce scale-free networks. We theoretically and empirically characterize the buyer-supplier network of the US economy and find that purely scale-free models have trouble matching key attributes of the network. We construct an alternative model that incorporates realistic fea...

The aim of this paper is to identify antecedents to supplier integration in China. A deductive approach was deployed by building on a qualitative pre-study and various strands of SCM literature. All in all, 14 hypotheses were derived and subsequently tested by drawing on an empirical sample collected from 88 manufacturing firms operating in China. The data was then analyzed using partial least ...

Whilst there is much research material on buyer and supplier performance assessment and management, a relationship perspective can bring an added dimension, especially to the performance of close, mutual relationships. This article aims to bring a relationship performance understanding to the study of buyer–supplier exchange. Unfortunately, business-to-business relationships are assumed to enha...

We consider a general Informed Principal Problem in the context of procurement. Both the potential suppliers and the buyer hold some private information: each supplier knows his cost of production, the buyer knows how much each supplier’s product …ts her technical requirements. We derive the optimal auction in this environment, and analyze the implementation problem with special emphasis on thr...