Strategic buyer–supplier relationships are increasingly viewed in both the scholarly and practitioner literatures as key drivers of sustainable competitive advantage. In particular, relationship specific adaptations – the extent to which exchange members make tangible or intangible adaptations for a partner – are acknowledged as one of the central issues. Such adaptations need to be examined in...

Supplier competition and investment of effort are important concerns in supply base design. They are affected not only by the number of suppliers, but also by their capacity profile. This paper studies supply base design in terms of the number and capacities of suppliers, considering both supplier competition and investment of cost-reduction effort. We analyze a buyer who invests in capacities ...

Communication in Supplier Relationships: The Case of Finnish Sourcing in China Objective of the study The objective of the study was to research the supplier relationship management in a case company from the perspective of business communication. The case company was a Finnish buyer organization and its supplier was a Chinese company in the health food industry. The study evaluated their relat...

A style dress outlet usually purchases products from multiple suppliers with different cost, quality and selling price. It is assumed that some suppliers will sell their goods to the buyer outright, while some other suppliers will offer return policy for items unsold. In the latter case, the supplier buys back from the buyer the unsold items at the end of the selling season. The purpose of this...

New business practices are forcing high-tech firms to reconsider their strategic thinking in R&D and supply chain management. How do these firms manage differing new product development strategies to facilitate collaboration with suppliers and customers? This paper examines the effects of modularization in black-box design and subsequent impacts on supplier-buyer partnerships by evaluating the ...

The purpose of the paper is to provide a simple model explaining buyer-supplier relationships and show what factors determine the number of trading partners. We show that when the supplier is able to determine the number of trading partners, the optimal number is small if the supplier’s bargaining power with them is weak, the economy of scope in the supplier’s variable costs is significant, and...

Across industries, a shift from business-to-business exchanges operated by independent agents to companyor consortia-run exchanges can be observed. Procurement platforms represent a major share of these exchanges. However, the design of these platforms remains a difficult task since interests of both the buyer and supplier side have to be considered. In this paper, we introduce the case of clic...

This paper presents a framework of buyer–supplier relationships used in an empirical study to investigate how the development of more collaborative relationships between UK retailers and freshproduce suppliers affects the financial performance of suppliers in such relationships. Relationships between key partnership characteristics and performance are discussed and empirically tested. In additi...

This paper develops a model for illustrating how to use quantity discount policy to achieve supply chain coordination. A supplier–buyer system selling one type of product with multi-period and probabilistic customer demand is considered. We first show that if both the buyer and supplier can find a coordination mechanism to make joint decisions, the joint profit in this situation is more than th...

Functional relationship between supplier and buyer in an open market place leads to investigate the role of both quantifiable and non-quantifiable parameters in coordination mechanism with the aim of achieving higher performance in supply chain activities. Here, we develop a supply chain model and a new agent to analyze and simulate the players’ behavior in the network. A cooperative game theor...