Environmental sustainability is an area of increasing importance for third party logistics (3PL) companies. As the design and implementation of services requires interaction between buyer and 3PL, the 3PLs are in a critical position to support the efforts towards greening operations of different supply chain participants. However the literature in this field reflects a gap between the perspecti...

This paper examines the importance of compatibility on buyer behavior in the market for LAN equipment over the period 1996 through 1998. I provide evidence that switching costs drive firm establishments to purchase LAN equipment from incumbent vendors. Because LAN equipment is a networked good, incumbency affects vendor choice both when it occurs at the same establishment and/or at other establ...

Dynamism of trade activity inevitably results in situations where sellers face local supply shortages. In such cases, sellers need to decide which buyer purchase requests to satisfy. Commonly, sellers satisfy purchase requests based on their arrival order, i.e., First In is First Served (FIFS). In electronic trade, sellers may follow strategies diier-ent from FIFS without the buyers being able ...

This paper investigates the role of incentives in the formation and conduct of buyersupplier relationships. It draws upon evidence collected during a two-year, EPSRCfunded research project. In this research project, the authors tested the proposition that the manner in which buyer-supplier relationships are formed and conducted is significantly affected by the incentive structure that exists be...

We develop a model to determine an integrated vendor-buyer inventory policy for items with imperfect quality and planned backorders. The production process is imperfect and produces a certain number of defective items with a known probability density function. The vendor delivers the items to the buyer in small lots of equally sized shipments. Upon receipt of the items, the buyer will conduct a...

We describe a common but poorly known type of fraud – so-called liar buyer fraud – and explain why traditional anti-fraud technology has failed to curb this problem. We then introduce a counter-intuitive technique based on user interface modification to address liar-buyer fraud, and report result of experiments supporting that our technique has the potential of dramatically reducing fraud losse...

Work and trade relationships are often governed by relational contracts, in which incentives for cooperative action today stem from the prospective future benefits of the relationship. In this paper, we study how reductions in clarity about the financial consequences of actions, induced by incomplete information about the costs of providing quality, affect relational contracts in buyer-seller r...

Recent theoretical research indicates that search deterrence strategies are generally optimal for sellers in consumer goods markets. Yet search deterrence is not always employed in such markets. To understand this incongruity, we develop an experimental market where profit-maximizing strategy dictates sellers should exercise one form of search deterrence, exploding offers. We find buyers are th...

In this paper, we consider a dual-channel vendor-buyer system consisting of a buyer and two vendor-owned facilities: a central distribution center (DC) and a regional DC. Orders for a single item are delivered through two distinct channels: an indirect channel, comprising the central DC, the regional DC and the buyer; and a direct channel, comprising the central DC and the buyer, bypassing the ...