Supply Chain Pricing in B-to-B Markets – A Case Study Application

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate an effective coordination process in the B-to-B section of a supply chain. In particular the paper focuses on the interactions between a supplier of raw materials and a buyer processing them into end products in the food industry. These interactions are governed by a delivery contract. Under the terms of the current contract a season's entire crop is purchased at time of planting at an unit price per pound regardless of volume and quality delivered. This simplicity of the contract is an attractive feature of the interaction in the B-to-B section. It is shown that the supply chain's optimum cannot be realized with a single price. From several alternatives a pricing scheme is proposed in which prices are related to quality. The goal is to determine prices which facilitate the supply chain's maximum performance assuming rational behaviour of the supplier and the buyer. Conditions for realizing the supply chain's maximum are formulated and an approach is presented which generates a significant improvement in performance. The authors thank an anonymous referee for his/her constructive suggestions.     

Measuring corporate internationalisation

Measures of corporate internationalisation have gained crucial importance in the recent debate on globalisation, since many scholars link globalisation to a quantitative increase in the international activities of firms. Opinions on the extent of this increase differ widely, however, depending on what measurement concept is used. As there is no universally applicable measurement concept, researchers face the difficult task of bringing research questions, measurement concepts and data availability into line. For useful comments the author would like to thank Douglas van den Berghe (University of Rotterdam), Dieter Plehwe (WZE), Stefano Vescovi (WZB) and Michael Wortmann (FAST e.V., Berlin). An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the workshop “Dimensionen der Internationalisierung von Unternehmen” at the Max-Planck-Institut für Gesellschaftsforschung, Cologne 16th/17th December 1999.     

Size,Growth, and Survival in the Upper Austrian Farm Sector

This paper investigates the evolution of the size distribution of more than 40,000 farms in the Upper Austrian farm sector over the period 1980–90. Using Gibrat's Law as our point of departure, we find that smaller farms grow much faster towards some minimum efficient scale of production than farms at or above this threshold size. We furthermore find evidence for the existence of two separate "centres of attraction" of farm size supporting the notion of a "disappearing middle" and the emergence of a bimodal structure of farm sizes. Correcting for size-related attrition bias had very little effect on our results.     

Towards a Performance Measurement Framework for Community Development Finance Institutions in the UK

Community Development Finance Institutions (CDFIs) are publicly funded organisations that provide small loans to people in financially underserved areas of the UK. Policy makers have repeatedly sought to understand and measure the performance of CDFIs to ensure the efficient use of public funds, but have struggled to identify an appropriate way of doing so. In this article, we empirically derive a framework that measures the performance of CDFIs through an analysis of their stakeholder relationships. Based on qualitative data from 20 English CDFIs, we develop a typology of CDFIs according to three dimensions: organisational structure, type of lending and type of market served. Following on from this, we derive several propositions that consider how these dimensions relate to the financial and social performance of CDFIs, and provide the basis for a performance measurement framework.      

Business and Human Rights in South Africa: An Analysis of Antecedents of Human Rights Due Diligence

The purpose of the present article is to analyse South African listed companies’ public reporting in order to contribute to our understanding of how and why companies consider human rights. The empirical analysis is placed in the context of the increasing prominence of human rights as a business issue, premised in part on the activities of the United Nations (UN) Special Representative of the Secretary General (SRSG) on human rights and business. On the basis of a content analysis of the public reports of the top 100 companies listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE), we test hypotheses focused on the antecedents of companies’ demonstrated human rights due diligence, with particular reference to assumptions or findings of the SRSG and institutional theory. Some of our results are unexpected: there is little influence exerted by the sector and size of companies in our sample, and there is also an unexpectedly insignificant impact of company participation in the UN Global Compact and the JSE Socially Responsible Investment Index. On the other hand, a key predictor of human rights due diligence is an explicit leadership commitment, and important roles are also played by government regulations and stock exchange listing rules.     

Export,Exchange Rate Risk and Hedging: The Duopoly Case

Abstract. This paper studies a Cournot duopoly in international trade with firms exposed to exchange rate risk. A hedging opportunity is introduced by a forward market on which one firm can trade the foreign currency. We investigate two settings: First, we assume that hedging and output decisions are taken simultaneously. It is shown that hedging is exclusively done for risk‐managing reasons as it is not possible to use hedging strategically. Second, the hedging decision is made before the output decisions. We show that hedging is not only used to manage the risk exposure but also as a strategic device.