Shaping buyer–supplier relationships in manufacturing contexts: Design and test of a contingency model

Although the idea that buyer–supplier partnerships can yield considerable benefits to firms is largely diffused among researchers and practitioners, the approach adopted in this paper is that no “one best way” exists in buyer–supplier relationships, but rather a “best way” for each specific exchange context. Hence, this paper proposes a contingency model for shaping and managing buyer–supplier relationships in manufacturing contexts. In order to test the model, an empirical study was performed on a sample of 45 buyer–supplier relationships within the Italian white goods industry. A three-dimensional performance indicator was computed to compare supplier performance achieved within relations matching the model's suggestions with those set differently. The results strongly suggest that suppliers involved in relationships set accordingly to the contingency model are likely to enjoy superior performance.     

Building long-term orientation in buyer–supplier relationships: The moderating role of culture

This research investigates buyer–supplier relationships in international markets. Research and practice have shown that buyer–supplier relationships benefit when partners to the relationship exhibit a long-term orientation. The extant literature suggests that a buyer's trust of a supplier and the supplier's performance affect the buyer's long-term orientation toward the relationship. We propose that the relative effects of trust and performance on long-term orientation are moderated by culture – specifically the individualism/collectivism dimension. Hypotheses are tested on data from two individualist and two collectivist cultures, using responses from over 600 purchasing professionals in the United States, Anglophone Canada, Francophone Canada and Mexico. Taken together, empirical findings suggest that cultural differences warrant consideration in developing successful purchasing strategies.     

Online reverse auctions and their role in buyer–supplier relationships

Despite the move in recent years towards supplier partnerships, buying firms need at times to make use of competitive procurement strategies for certain purchases. This study examines the impact of reverse auctions on buyer–supplier relationships through six case studies, analysing primarily the supplier perspective through participant interviews. The authors identify that there are potential benefits for both parties in a reverse auction, which can offer tendering and transactional cost advantages. For buyers, it offers a competitive procurement process. The effect on relationships will depend on the extent to which buyers employ the auction as a price weapon, or whether it is used primarily as a process improvement tool.     

Purchasing strategies in the Kraljic matrix—A power and dependence perspective

Kraljic's purchasing portfolio approach has inspired many academics to undertake further research into purchasing portfolio models. Refined models typically recommend one purchasing strategy for each portfolio quadrant. Yet, it has been shown that purchasers make a clear distinction between alternative purchasing strategies within each quadrant. The fundamental assumption of portfolio models seems to be that differences in power and dependence between buyers and suppliers exist. Still, little is known about how these concepts influence the choice for a specific purchasing strategy. In this paper, ‘relative power’ and ‘total interdependence’ for a number of portfolio-based purchasing strategies have been quantified empirically, using data from a comprehensive survey among Dutch purchasing professionals. The survey data largely confirmed the hypotheses that were deduced from the literature.     

Developing cost management in customer–supplier relationships: three case studies

This study describes cost management development projects in three customer–supplier relationships and analyzes these projects from the perspective of relationships. Differences in suppliers’ objectives, actions taken, and results gained in the projects were found in the explorative study, although the customer's objective was the same in all cases. The use of cost information depended on the balance of power between firms, on the trust between personnel, and on the volume of the firms’ mutual business.     

Lean production and supplier relations: a survey of practices in the Aragonese automotive industry

This paper analyzes the main results of a survey to 28 automotive suppliers in the Spanish region of Aragón. It has been found in a regression analysis that the rotation of tasks and teamworking are positively correlated with the training and the use of modular components. Nearly half of the companies cooperate with customers, suppliers, and technological centers to improve their production processes but only two companies cooperate with their customers in component development and design which indicates an underinvolvement of the surveyed companies with the automotive manufacturers. The companies are much more integrated with the automakers in the delivery process, since more than half of the companies have daily deliveries and directly to the assembly line of the automaker.     

Business conditions, shared resources and integrative practices in the supply chain

Integration is one of the important concepts in supply chain management. Both in theoretical and empirical contributions, it is shown that integrative practices improve supply chain performance. Our knowledge with respect to which integrative practices are appropriate under different circumstances is limited. This paper develops propositions regarding the influence of business conditions and the type of resources on integrative practices in links between buyers and suppliers. We will study nine business units and the relationship with their key buyers. For each unit, we will investigate the business conditions, the employment of resources for key buyers and the type and level of integrative practices. Higher complexity in business conditions requires higher levels of integration (specifically in the areas of planning and organisation), which are stimulated by buyer-focused resources and restricted by shared resources. In case of lower complexity, we find lower levels of integrative practices. Here, the influence of shared resources on integration is limited.     

我国汽车行业产业政策对产业集中度影响分析

文章分析了我国汽车产业发展现状和汽车产业集中度的变化趋势,选取1990～2006年我国汽车行业的统计数据,建立了汽车产业政策对我国汽车产业集中度的影响分析模型,借助线性回归方法,分析了产业政策等因素对产业集中度的影响。实证分析结果表明:产业政策、期初集中度和产品差异性对产业集中度的提高有促进作用;企业进入对产业集中度的提高有负向的阻碍作用。     

A企业的供应商分类策略研究

在整个物资采购网络中,为了增强对供应商管理和控制的有效性,企业应将供应商划分为不同类型的群体。然后对不同类型的物资供应商采取不同的供应商管理模式．以节省管理成本,提高采购柔性,适应市场的变化。从企业供应商分类的现状及存在的问题着手．以物品本身的重要性和其供应市场复杂程度为依据,重新建立采购物品分类模型,最后通过企业实例进行了验证分析。     

Vendor managed inventory: a survey of the Taiwanese grocery industry

Recent research has shown the importance of improving the supply chain competitiveness by means of strategic alliances. This study considers the retailer–supplier partnership through a vendor managed inventory (VMI) system. The characteristics of a VMI system and a retailer–supplier power relationship are discussed in some detail with a case illustration to examine the practical implementations of the system in the Taiwanese grocery industry. VMI not only has the ability to reduce costs, but also to improve service levels and create business opportunities for both parties in the supply chain. Thus, it is considered as one of the main systems in a strategic alliance.     

On the interpretation of cointegration in the linear–quadratic inventory model

The traditional formulation of the linear–quadratic inventory model with unit roots predicts cointegration between inventories and sales. That formulation implies that marginal production costs and the marginal benefits of inventories are both tending to ∞, and the cointegrating coefficient reflects the optimal trade-off between these competing factors. This paper suggests a reformulation of the problem in which marginal production costs and marginal inventory benefits are both stationary and in which the cointegrating coefficient is the same as the value that characterizes the target inventory level in the cost function.     

The influence of reputation on supplier selection: An empirical study of the European automotive industry

Using an original database, integrated with information by the web, we propose an ex-post analysis on the main factors influencing the selection process of tier 1 suppliers in the automotive industry. There is plenty of literature on how buyers should select their suppliers, but the literature on how they really do so is scarce. We contribute analysing an original database collecting purchasing contracts information within the automotive components market in Europe. We investigate, through different econometric approaches the influence of traditional supplier selection criteria in combination with different reputation factors. Our findings suggest that reputation plays a crucial role more than classical criteria; in particular, suppliers, which serve a diversified customer portfolio or with strong exposure to premium brand customers have better chances to gain additional orders and broaden their customer base even more. The latter means that OEMs have to increase their reputation in order to be more attractive for suppliers.     

Monopoly regulation without the Spence–Mirrlees assumption

The paper extends the Baron and Myerson [Baron, D., Myerson, R.B., 1982. Regulating a monopolist with unknown costs. Econometrica 50, 911–930] model of monopoly regulation to bidimensional adverse selection: both the marginal cost and the fixed cost of the monopoly are unknown to the regulator. Like in Araujo and Moreira [Araujo, A., Moreira, H., 2000. Adverse section problems without the Spence–Mirrlees condition. Fundação Getulio Vargas, Rio de Janeiro, Ensaios Economicos 389], the paper provides an explicit solution of a screening model without the Spence–Mirrlees assumption.     

A characterization of equilibria in the Groves–Ledyard mechanism

In this paper, we characterize all interior and boundary equilibria of the Groves–Ledyard mechanism for a large class of economies and determine their stability properties. We show that the mechanism admits three types of equilibria: a symmetric, efficient, stable interior equilibrium, a large set of asymmetric, efficient, unstable, interior equilibria, and a large set of asymmetric, inefficient, stable boundary equilibria. We further show that asymmetric equilibria fail to exist for large values of the punishment parameter or if the message space is bounded sufficiently. The boundary equilibria previously had not been located nor had the instability of the asymmetric equilibria been known. Interestingly, the stability of the symmetric equilibrium rests on two dynamics that individually produce instability.     

Pathways of stakeholder influence in the Canadian forestry industry

We draw on the stakeholder influence literature to propose and empirically test hypotheses regarding the direct and indirect pathways of perceived influence that stakeholders exercise within the domain of corporate sustainability. Our results allow us to examine the interaction between different types of stakeholder pressure and different types of stakeholder influence strategy. We show that stakeholders who do not control resources critical to the focal firm's operations are able to pressure a firm indirectly via other stakeholders on whose resources the firm is dependent. We contribute to the stakeholder perspective by showing how stakeholders who are affected by the focal firm's operations can enhance their salience via stakeholders who can affect the firm. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

Estimating the Kullback–Liebler risk based on multifold cross‐validation

This paper concerns a class of model selection criteria based on cross‐validation techniques and estimative predictive densities. Both the simple or leave‐one‐out and the multifold or leave‐m‐out cross‐validation procedures are considered. These cross‐validation criteria define suitable estimators for the expected Kullback–Liebler risk, which measures the expected discrepancy between the fitted candidate model and the true one. In particular, we shall investigate the potential bias of these estimators, under alternative asymptotic regimes for m. The results are obtained within the general context of independent, but not necessarily identically distributed, observations and by assuming that the candidate model may not contain the true distribution. An application to the class of normal regression models is also presented, and simulation results are obtained in order to gain some further understanding on the behavior of the estimators.     

Beyond win–win: A syncretic theory on corporate stakeholder engagement in sustainable development

This article explores the concept of syncretism to articulate the construct of a novel theoretical approach that may help to accelerate progress in developing substantively more sustainable business activities. One reason why the integration of environmental and social responsibility in business has been so difficult to achieve in practice is that it is not just a battle of competing business logics but a battle of faiths. The concept of syncretism, with its roots in religious synthesis, may be far more relevant and useful than conventional approaches to combining the two, which rarely seem to rise above a “win–win” appeal to logic. The connectionist logic of syncretism may show us a way beyond paradigmatic conformity in business sustainability research so that scholars with diverse theoretical backgrounds might have a common ground for discussion, find constructive connections, and engage in potentially more insightful and creative interactions to develop our understanding of corporate sustainability.     

The Impact of Work–Family Programs on the Relationship between Gender Diversity and Performance

Work–family programs signal an employer's perspective on gender diversity to employees, and can influence whether the effects of diversity on performance are positive or negative. This article tests the interactive effects of nonmanagement gender diversity and work–family programs on productivity, and management gender diversity and work–family programs on financial performance. The predictions were tested in 198 Australian publicly listed organizations using primary (survey) and secondary (publicly available) data based on a two‐year time lag between diversity and performance. The findings indicate that nonmanagement gender diversity leads to higher productivity in organizations with many work–family programs, and management gender diversity leads to lower financial performance in organizations with few work–family programs. The results suggest different business cases at nonmanagement and management levels for the adoption of work–family programs in gender‐diverse organizations. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.