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 explorative study examines customer-supplier relationships from the perspective of psychological contracts. Based on findings from a multiple case study, the content of the psychological contracts of individuals involved in customer-supplier relationships are presented. The study provides support for the use of psychological contracts for describing the dynamics of customer-supplier relati...

In today’s highly competitive manufacturing environment, an effective supplier selection process is very important for the success of any business organization. Selection of the best supplier is always a difficult task for the purchasing manager. Suppliers have varied strengths and weaknesses which require careful assessment by the purchasing manager before selecting and ranking them. Any suppl...

The assessment and selection of green supplier development programs are an intriguing and functional research subject. This paper proposes a group decision-making approach considering possibilistic statistical concepts under uncertainty to assess green supplier development programs (GSDPs) via interval-valued fuzzy sets (IVFSs). Possibility theory is employed to regard uncertainty by IVFSs. A n...

The mainstream view holds that over time buyer–supplier relationships evolve through a number of phases. As a consequence, supplier development as a buyer–supplier relationship management practice should also be adapted to the life-cycle phase. Supplier development activities matching the buyer– supplier relationship life-cycle phase will lead to more favorable performance improvements. However...

Reliability as well as validity of an assessment is very important. However, reliability has been frequently overlooked in assessment for supplier selection, while validity has been treated extensively. In this paper, I propose a methodology that can evaluate the reliability of assessment. The well-known gauge R&R study is applied for the purpose. An assessor is able to easily apply the propose...

Abstract Vendor Selection Problem (VSP) has been considered in this paper as an integrated method of Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAHP) and Quality Function Deployment (QFD) in the pharmaceutical company. In QFD method, determining the importance of the "weights" for the customer requirements is an essential and crucial issue. FAHP has been used to determine the importance of the "we...