Managing the purchasing task in the supply chain has been a challenge in the last decade for many corporations. The need to gain a global competitive edge on the supply side has increased substantially. Particularly for companies who spend a high percentage of their sales revenue on parts and material supplies, and whose material costs represent a larger portion of total costs, savings from sup...

We analyze the sourcing decisions of firms that may choose between two types of suppliers: responsible suppliers that are costly but adhere to the strictest social and environmental responsibility standards, and normal suppliers that are less expensive but may randomly experience responsibility violations. There are two potential consequences of any such violation to the buying firm: costs may ...

This paper studies multi-tier supply chain networks in the presence of disruption risk. Firms decide how to source their inputs from upstream suppliers so as to maximize their expected profits, and prices of intermediate goods are set so that markets clear. We provide an explicit characterization of equilibrium prices and profits, which allows us to derive insights on how the network structure,...

Evidence shows that suppliers refrain from investing in energy efficiency (EE) measures because they fear that a buyer with greater bargaining power will use the EE-related cost reductions to push prices down, in the purchase bargaining process, and thereby further reduce the supplier’s profit margin. Suppliers are also discouraged from EE investment by the uncertainty associated with new techn...

We apply agency theory to model vertical inter-firm relationships and study risk sharing between manufacturers and first-tier suppliers in the Italian high-precision air conditioning (AC) industry. We explore to what extent buyers and suppliers share risk, and how suppliers’ financial, structural and technological characteristics, used as proxies for environmental uncertainty, moral hazard and ...

The paper introduces and discusses definitions and concepts from the supplier relationship management area. This review has the goal to provide readers with the basic conditions to understand the market mechanisms and the technological developments of the SRM market. Further on, the work gives a picture of the actual business environment in which the SRM vendors are in, and the main trends in t...

In recent years dozens of nations have begun exporting software products and services. We label these nations the “new software exporting nations”. We introduce a four-tier taxonomy of software exporting nations. Thresholds for the tiers are defined by export revenues, by cluster size, and by maturity. Tier 1 nations are the major software exporting nations; Tier 2 nations are the transition so...

In this paper, we develop a general multitiered supply chain network equilibrium model consisting of competing suppliers and competing firms who purchase components for the assembly of their final branded products and, if capacity permits, and it enhances profits, produce their own components. The competitive behavior of each tier of decision-makers is described along with their strategic varia...

In this paper, we establish a dynamic game to allocate CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) to the members of a supply chain. We propose a model of a three-tier supply chain in a decentralized state which includes a supplier, a manufacturer and a retailer. For analyzing supply chain performance in decentralized state and the relationships between the members of the supply chain, we use a Stack...

This study proposes a bi-objective mixed possibilistic, two-stage stochastic programming model to address supplier selection and order allocation problem to build the resilient supply base under operational and disruption risks. The model accounts for epistemic uncertainty of critical data and applies several proactive strategies such as suppliers’ business continuity plans, fortification of su...