competition and cooperation in decentralized push and pull assembly systems in this paper we study a decentralized assembly system consisting of a single assembler who buys complementary components from independent suppliers under two contracting schemes push and pull in both schemes the component suppliers are allowed to freely form coalitions or alliances among themselves to better coordinate their pricing or production decisions we show that the sole driver of the inefficiency in a push system which is due to horizontal decentralization of suppliers is the number of alliances that were formed specifically it is shown that in a push system the assembler s profit the total profit of all suppliers and the consumers surplus are all decreasing in the number of coalitions and are thus maximized when the grand coalition is formed we further carry out a stability analysis of coalition structures to verify to what extent suppliers can reduce or eliminate the inefficiency due to their decentralization by forming alliances we show that in a push system with more than two

searching for the firm the role of decision in the economics of organizations this paper considers reasons for the existence of firms and concludes that traditional perspectives provided by economics may be unsatisfactory and incomplete it suggests that there has been an overemphasis on the role of contractual relations in economic organization and argues instead that it is the character of decisions that defines and influences the nature of firms the paper explores some directions for integrating decisions into studies of the firm copyright 2000 by oxford university press

on the effects of downstream entry we study the effects of entry in a downstream market where firms e g compaq and ibm cvs and safeway buy an input e g microprocessor grocery items from an upstream supplier e g intel procter gamble and sell their output to consumers we show demand conditions where contrary to conventional wisdom entry of a new downstream firm lowers the downstream market output and increases the consumer price thus consumers may be better off with fewer sellers in such markets we also show that this entry may cause the profit of each incumbent downstream firm to i remain unchanged ii decrease or iii even increase also for a class of widely used demand conditions the supplier s optimal price is shown invariant to the entry exit of its downstream buyer firms we classify all possible effects of downstream entry in terms of fundamental market demand conditions

group lending repayment incentives and social collateral abstract in this paper we investigate the impact on repayment rates of lending to groups which are made jointly liable for repayment this type of scheme especially in the guise of the grameen bank in bangladesh has received increasing attention we set up and analyze the repayment game which group lending gives rise to our analysis suggests that such schemes have both positive and negative effects on repayment rates the positive effect is that successful group members may have an incentive to repay the loans of group members whose projects have yielded insufficient return to make repayment worthwhile the negative effect arises when the whole group defaults even when some members would have repaid under individual lending we also show how group lending may harness social collateral which serves to mitigate its negative effect

component procurement strategies in decentralized assemble to order systems with time dependent pricing we consider a contract manufacturer who procures multiple components from independent suppliers to produce an assemble to order customized product for a client the unit price of the product depends on the manufacturer s delivery lead time we explore how the manufacturer can use a vendor managed consignment inventory vmci scheme to manage the underlying risk and coordinate independent suppliers decisions on the production quantities of their components under demand uncertainty we formulate the problem as a stackelberg game played by the manufacturer against her component suppliers to determine her pricing policy for suppliers consignment inventories we further develop an efficient algorithm for finding the manufacturer s optimal pricing scheme our results provide useful insights for managing components in these types of assemble to order environments and for understanding how component production cost and procurement lead times affect individual firms performance in decentralized assembly channels

strategy research governance and competence perspectives business strategy is a complex subject and is usefully examined from several perspectives this paper applies the lenses of governance and competence to the study of strategy both the governance and the competence perspectives have had the benefit of distinguished antecedents they have also had to deal with tautological reputations i begin with the governance perspective with emphasis on the six key moves through which it has been operationalized i then examine the competence perspective in these same six respects governance challenges the competence perspective to apply itself more assiduously to operationalization including the need to choose and give definition to one or more units of analysis of which the routine is a promising candidate the research challenges posed by competence to which governance can and should respond include dynamic transaction costs learning and the need to push beyond generic governance to address strategy issues faced by particular firms with their distinctive strengths and disabilities a lively research future for these two perspectives individually and in combination is projected copyright 1999 john wiley sons ltd business strategy is an expansive enterprise not only do all of the functional areas in the business school relate but strategy is by nature interdisciplinary all of the social sciences especially economics and organization theory plus contract law are implicated indeed in the high technology arena where some of the most difficult strategy issues reside engineering and the law on intellectual property rights also have a bearing of the various approaches to the study of strategy this paper focuses on the governance and competence perspectives both perspectives combine economic reasoning with organization theory as between these two the governance

pricing and the news vendor problem a review with extensions in the newsvendor problem a decision maker facing random demand for a perishable product decides how much of it to stock for a single selling period this simple problem with its intuitively appealing solution is a crucial building block of stochastic inventory theory which comprises a vast literature focusing on operational efficiency typically in this literature market parameters such as demand and selling price are exogenous however incorporating these factors into the mode l can provide an excellent vehicle for examining how operational problems interact with marketing issues to influence decision making at the firm level in this paper we examine an extension of the newsvendor problem in which stocking quantity and selling price are set simultaneously we provide a comprehensive review that synthesizes existing results for the single period problem and develop additional results to enrich the existing knowledge base we also review and develop insight into a dynamic inventory extension of this problem and motivate the applicability of such models

towards a more ethically correct governance for economic sustainability in this paper we propose that economic sustainability is seen in terms of inter temporal and inter national value creation we claim that value appropriation or capture can become a constraint to economic sustainability we propose that for sustainable value creation to be fostered corporate governance needs to be aligned to public and supra national governance in order to achieve this a hierarchically layered set of agencies needs to be diagnosed and the issue of incentive alignment addressed enlightened self interest pluralism and diversity as well as a representative supra national organisation for world wide economic sustainability can serve as a new more ethically correct governance for economic sustainability but not a panacea

joint pricing and production decisions with yield uncertainty and downconversion abstract we consider a firm who supplies two types of products high end and low end because of the uncertainty in the production process the yield rate of the high end products is uncertain the substandard high end products caused by the yield uncertainty can be transformed into the low end products with a certain cost we characterize the optimal pricing and production decisions and develop an algorithm to compute the optimal solution we also investigate the impact of the yield uncertainty on the firm s performance and explore how stability of market demand emergent fulfillment costs and downconversion cost influence this effect we find that i the profit of the firm deteriorates when the risk of the yield uncertainty is high in the face of yield uncertainty the firm prefers to decrease increase the production quantity of the high end low end products ii when the market demands are quite unstable the emergent fulfillment costs are low or the downconversion cost is high the firm has a low incentive to eliminate the yield uncertainty

equilibrium analysis of supply chain structures under power imbalance abstract this paper investigates the implications of channel power on supply chain stability in a setting where multiple suppliers sell substitutable products through a common retailer such supply chains have been traditionally analyzed as one or two stage stackelberg non cooperative games with all suppliers sharing balanced equal decision making power in this paper we relax this assumption and formulate game theoretic models to examine scenarios where one supplier can act as the stackelberg leader consequently we analyze new supply chain structures and introduce the notion of structure dominance a novel approach to analyze the performance of supply chains that has practical implications thus a decision maker can employ the concepts of structure dominance to determine whether there exist supply chain scenarios that are more stable than others i e less prone to power reconfigurations at both agent and group level we find that power imbalance causes significant declines in supply chain profits and the more balanced the agents are the higher their profits when demand is linear regardless of product competition it develops that neither the manufacturer stackelberg nor the retailer stackelberg supply chains are stable structures in our generalized setting but that structures where power is equally split between agents provide for best stability and performance

robust price setting newsvendor model with interval market size and consumer willingness to pay we consider a price setting newsvendor problem with partial information the newsvendor does not know the price dependent probability distribution of demand but is able to estimate lower and upper limits of the market size and consumer willingness to pay the objective is to minimize the maximum loss in expected profit or minimax regret we derive closed form expressions for optimal quantity and price and identify managerial insights

joint pricing production decisions in supply chains of complementary products with uncertain demand consider n manufacturers each producing a different product and selling it to a market either directly or through a common retailer the n products are perfectly complementary in the sense that they are always sold and consumed jointly or in sets of one unit of each demand for the products during a selling season is both price sensitive and uncertain each of the n manufacturers faces the problem of choosing a production quantity and a selling price for his product two settings are considered regarding the decision sequence of the n manufacturers they are either simultaneous or sequential the retailer when present employs a consignment sales contract with revenue sharing to bind her relationship with the manufacturers and to extract profit for herself using a multiplicative demand model in this paper we fully characterize individual firms decisions in equilibria under each of the two game settings and derive closed form performance measures both for the channel and for individual channel members these closed form solutions allow us to explore the effects of channel structure and parameters on firms decisions and performance that lead to conclusions of managerial interest

price and warranty period decisions for complementary products with horizontal firms cooperation noncooperation strategies abstract the purpose of this paper is to explore the optimal strategies on price and warranty period of two complementary products in a supply chain with two manufacturers and one common retailer from a two stage game theoretic perspective five decentralized models are established by considering the two manufacturers cooperation noncooperation strategies and the firms different bargain powers the corresponding closed form expressions for equilibrium decisions are obtained through a systematic analysis and comparison some interesting and valuable managerial insights are established we find that the retailer always has the advantage to get the higher profit when she is a leader however this is not always valid for two manufacturers for example two manufacturers profits when they are leaders and they adopt the noncooperation strategy in the supply chain are lower than that when two manufacturers and the retailer have the identical market power all channel members as well as consumers benefit from lower retail prices longer warranty periods and larger profits when the two manufacturers adopt cooperation action

foreign market entry strategies and post entry growth acquisitions vs greenfield investments we examine the relationship between the foreign market entry strategy and the subsequent growth of a subsidiary we build upon the penrose theory of firm growth and on the organizational economics international management and foreign market entry strategy literatures we hypothesize that the post entry growth of acquisitions is positively associated with weak and codifiable interdependence within the multinational enterprise network whereas the post entry growth of greenfield investments is positively related to strong and complex interdependence empirical findings from a sample of japanese subsidiaries in the us lend support to our argument

game theoretic analyses of decentralized assembly supply chains non cooperative equilibria vs coordination with cost sharing contracts abstract this paper considers a multiple supplier single manufacturer assembly supply chain where the suppliers produce components of a short life cycle product which is assembled by the manufacturer in this single period problem the suppliers determine their production quantities and the manufacturer chooses the retail price we assume that the manufacturer faces a random price dependent demand in either additive or multiplicative form for each case we analyze both simultaneous move and leader follower games to respectively determine the nash and stackelberg equilibria and find the globally optimal solution that maximizes the system wide expected profit then we introduce appropriate buy back and lost sales cost sharing contracts to coordinate this assembly supply chain so that when all the suppliers and the manufacturer adopt their equilibrium solutions the system wide expected profit is maximized

united we stand or divided we stand strategic supplier alliances under order default risk we study the alliance formation strategy among suppliers in a framework with one downstream firm and n upstream suppliers each supplier faces an exogenous random shock that may result in an order default each of them also has access to a recourse fund that can mitigate this risk the suppliers can share the fund resources within an alliance but they need to equitably allocate the profits of the alliance among the partners in this context suppliers need to decide whether to join larger alliances that have better chances of order fulfillment or smaller ones that may grant them higher profit allocations we first analytically characterize the exact coalition proof nash stable coalition structures that would arise for symmetric complementary or substitutable suppliers our analysis reveals that it is the appeal of default risk mitigation rather than competition reduction that motivates cooperation in general a riskier and or less fragmented supply base favors larger alliances whereas substitutable s

intrafirm competition and charter evolution in the multibusiness firm we develop a theoretical framework for a specific form of intrafirm competition namely the extent of overlap between the charters of two or more units in a single organization this phenomenon is commonly seen in large organizations e g cases of two business units producing competing products or two product development groups trying to solve the same technological problem but the existing academic literature provides little insight into the forms intrafirm competition takes or the conditions under which it is beneficial or harmful to the organization building on the concept of an organization charter galunic and eisenhardt 2001 we identify two generic forms of intrafirm competition the dynamic community model has fluid and frequently changing charter boundaries and it emerges through the creation of strategic options in the face of a changing environment the coexistence model has fixed and relatively static charter boundaries and it owes its existence to economies of scope and differentiation of unit charters to cover multiple market segments in the body of the paper we develop a theoretical framework to specify the environmental and organizational conditions under which each form of intrafirm competition is expected to occur

the provision of incentives in firms i ncentives are the essence of economics despite many wide ranging claims about their supposed importance there has been little empirical assessment of incentive provision for workers the purpose of this paper is to critically overview existing work on the provision of incentives since the interests of workers and their employers are not always aligned a large theoretical literature has emphasized how firms design compensation contracts to induce employees to operate in the firm s interest this literature has reached into many areas of compensation and has pointed to a multitude of different mechanisms that can be used to induce workers to act in the interests of their employers these include piece rates options discretionary bonuses promotions profit sharing efficiency wages deferred compensation and so on my objective here is to evaluate this literature in the light of a growing empirical literature on compensation where possible i will address the literature from two perspectives first an underlying assumption of this literature is that individuals respond to contracts that reward performance accordingly i consider whether agents behave in this way and whether these responses are always in the firm s interest second i address whether firms write contracts with these responses in mind in other words do contracts look like the predictions of the theory incentives are provided to workers

group lending with sequential financing contingent renewal and social capital this paper focuses on the dynamic aspects of group lending in particular sequential financing and contingent renewal we examine the efficacy of these two schemes in harnessing social capital we find that for the appropriate parameter configurations there is homogenous group formation so that the lender can ascertain the identity of a group without lending to all its members thus screening out bad borrowers partially moreover under certain parameter configurations negative assortative matching occurs as a robust phenomenon

learning innovation increasing returns and resource creation luigi pasinetti s original sin of and call for a post classical economics we draw on the seminal contribution to economics by luigi pasinetti respond to his call to reverse what he saw as the original sin of classical economists exacerbated by neoclassical economists namely the assumption of non increasing returns to scale and move towards building a post classical economics we outline the contours of a post classical framework that draws on key themes and contributions from pasinetti on learning technical progress increasing returns resource creation trade and catching up and contributions from within and without economics that are in line with lend support to and challenge it we advocate the pressing need and opportune timing for a concerted effort to revitalise ideas from the once vibrant cambridge school of economics and help develop a fresh more pluralist and inclusive post classical economics that cuts across divides and opens up opportunities for a less dismal science

anniversary article the strategy field from the perspective of management science divergent strands and possible integration we reflect on the evolution of the strategy field as seen through the window ofmanagement science reflecting the diverse disciplinary roots of strategy research we identify a broad ranging body of work that varies with respect to the assumptions made regarding individual rationality and the level of analysis at which the research is carried out we argue that recent developments begin to delineate a potentially unifying conceptual framework for treating the field s defining questions the conceptual apparatus of evolutionary economics we conclude by laying out important challenges for evolutionary economics if it is to serve as a foundation for both the positive and the normative research agendas of the strategy field

thy neighbor s keeper the design of a credit cooperative with theory and a test economists now appreciate that resource allocation in less economically developed economies is profoundly influenced by non firm economic institutions however our theories of non firm institutions often suggest different answers to many questions including those of policy this paper illustrates a method for discriminating between alternative theories using data from german credit cooperatives from the nineteenth and early twentieth century germany we build a model of credit cooperatives designed to provide monitoring incentives and test this using nineteenth century data authors

combined pricing and inventory control under uncertainty this paper addresses the simultaneous determination of pricing and inventory replenishment strategies in the face of demand uncertainty more specifically we analyze the following single item periodic review model demands in consecutive periods are independent but their distributions depend on the item s price in accordance with general stochastic demand functions the price charged in any given period can be specified dynamically as a function of the state of the system a replenishment order may be placed at the beginning of some or all of the periods stockouts are fully backlogged we address both finite and infinite horizon models with the objective of maximizing total expected discounted profit or its time average value assuming that prices can either be adjusted arbitrarily upward or downward or that they can only be decreased we characterize the structure of an optimal combined pricing and inventory strategy for all of the above types of models we also develop an efficient value iteration method to compute these optimal strategies finally we report on an extensive numerical study that characterizes various qualitative properties of the optimal strategies and corresponding optimal profit values

a general equilibrium model for industries with price and service competition this paper develops a stochastic general equilibrium inventory model for an oligopoly in which all inventory constraint parameters are endogenously determined we propose several systems of demand processes whose distributions are functions of all retailers prices and all retailers service levels we proceed with the investigation of the equilibrium behavior of infinite horizon models for industries facing this type of generalized competition under demand uncertainty we systematically consider the following three competition scenarios 1 price competition only here we assume that the firms service levels are exogenously chosen but characterize how the price and inventory strategy equilibrium vary with the chosen service levels 2 simultaneous price and service level competition here each of the firms simultaneously chooses a service level and a combined price and inventory strategy 3 two stage competition the firms make their competitive choices sequentially in a first stage all firms simultaneously choose a service level in a second stage the firms simultaneously choose a combined pricing and inventory strategy with full knowledge of the service levels selected by all competitors we show that in all of the above settings a nash equilibrium of infinite horizon stationary strategies exists and that it is of a simple structure provided a nash equilibrium exists in a so called reduced game we pay particular attention to the question of whether a firm can choose its service level on the basis of its own input characteristics i e its cost parameters and demand function only we also investigate under which of the demand models a firm under simultaneous competition responds to a change in the exogenously specified characteristics of the various competitors by either i adjusting its service level and price in the same direction thereby compensating for price increases decreases by offering improved inferior service or ii adjusting them in opposite directions thereby simultaneously offering better or worse prices and service

knowledge based approaches to the theory of the firm some critical comments it is argued that kogut and zander kogut b u zander 1992 knowledge of the firm combinative capabilities and the replication of technology organ sci 3 383 397 and conner conner k r 1991 a historical comparison of resource based theory and five schools of thought within industrial organization economics do we have a new theory of the firm j management 17 121 154 erred in the specific way in which they claimed that a distinct theory of the multi person firm can be constructed on the basis of a theory of organizational knowledge or from resource based insights it is not possible to tell very much of a story about why there should be firms in lieu of notions such as opportunism or moral hazard however properly interpreted knowledge based theories may help shed light on issues relating to the boundaries and internal organization of the firm

pricing games and impact of private demand information in decentralized assembly systems this paper analyzes decentralized assembly systems under asymmetric demand information and sequential contracting we reveal new insights on the value of contract type price only versus complex demand information complete versus asymmetric and contract sequence first mover versus second mover to different players our results for the basic model show the following 1 complex contracts increase the suppliers aggregate profit however individual suppliers do not necessarily benefit from a complex contracting equilibrium we identify the conditions under which each supplier benefits from such an equilibrium 2 eliminating information asymmetry is not always beneficial for the suppliers because obtaining information might bring only marginal value and hence might not be realistically justified furthermore a downstream supplier might prefer information asymmetry to complete information especially when demand variability is moderate 3 unless there is a high demand risk the first mover advantage is prevalent when the assembler is a price taker we extend our basic model to analyze two additional scenarios first we study cases where the suppliers may offer contracts of different complexity beyond enriching our understanding of contract choice in decentralized assembly systems such variations enhance the analysis beyond the standard methodology of principal agent models and utilize solution techniques from optimal control second we analyze the situation where the suppliers may possess different levels of information on demand under complex contracts we show that an upstream supplier always benefits from a downstream supplier s superior information however the additional information might decrease the downstream supplier s profit especially when the forecast variability is low compared to the total demand variability in the system our results for the basic model and its extensions confirm that studying interactions between suppliers specifically under different contract types and information structures in assembly systems presents rich opportunities for future research

on sequential commitment in the price dependent newsvendor model abstract we investigate the effect of sequential commitment in the decentralized newsvendor model with price dependent demand sequential commitment allows the self profit maximizing parties to commit to contract parameters e g wholesale price retail price buyback price and order quantity sequentially and alternately and we investigate its effect on the equilibrium profits of the channel and its members sequential commitment introduces more flexibility to contracting in the supply chain and our analysis can provide some insight to channel members who follow a bargaining process to determine the values of contract parameters we show that the introduction of sequential commitment to the price dependent pd newsvendor model with buybacks can significantly improve the manufacturer s and the channel expected profits but it can also decrease the retailer s expected profit finally we demonstrate that with sequential commitment under some conditions the choice of the first mover is endogenized and we identify the unique sequence of commitments by channel members that would arise in equilibrium

micro credit initiatives for equitable and sustainable development who pays abstract there is a growing acknowledgement that micro credit programs have potential for equitable and sustainable development however my anthropological research on the micro credit program of the grameen bank shows that bank workers are expected to increase disbursement of loans among their members and press for high recovery rates to earn profit necessary for economic viability of the institution to ensure timely repayment in the loan centers bank workers and borrowing peers inflict an intense pressure on women clients in the study community many borrowers maintain their regular payment schedules through a process of loan recycling that considerably increases the debt liability on the individual households increases tension and frustration among household members produces new forms of dominance over women and increases violence in society

supply chain performance and consumer surplus under alternative structures of channel dominance abstract supply chain partnerships exhibit varying degrees of power distribution among the agents this has implications for pricing and operational decisions in the channel and eventually influences the end customers to understand how different power schemes affect the supply chain partners performance and consumer surplus we study channel structures with a dominant manufacturer a dominant retailer and no single agent dominance under random and price sensitive demand channel dominance is interpreted in our setting as exerting power to determine the retail and wholesale prices as well as to transfer the inventory risk to the weaker party we analyze all problems in a game theory based framework and characterize the equilibrium retail price wholesale price and order production quantity we show that the manufacturer dominated channel structure leads to the highest production quantity the lowest retail price and the largest expected surplus for an individual buyer on the other hand the entire channel profit and the total consumer surplus are highest when the retailer holds the channel dominance while both the manufacturer and the retailer are better off when they become a power agent individually channel dominance does not always guarantee higher share of channel profits as we show under the manufacturer dominated structure further insights are derived analytically and numerically from comparisons of the manufacturer retailer dominance schemes with the no single agent dominance structure and integrated channel we also study extensions to investigate the effect of demand model and risk sharing and we address industry settings with alternative schemes of holding cost shortage penalty and salvage value

learning to contract evidence from the personal computer industry organizational forms involving more detailed contracts than are found in traditional spot market exchanges appear to be increasingly prevalent there has been relatively little analysis however of the extent to which firms learn how to use contracts to manage their interfirm relationships over time in this paper we conduct a detailed case study of a time series of 11 contracts concluded during 1989 1997 between the same two partners both of whom participate in the personal computer industry to explore whether and how firms learn to contract we find many changes to the structure of the contracts that cannot be fully explained by changes in the assets at risk in the relationship and evidence that these changes are largely the result of processes in which the firms were learning how to work together including learning how to contract with each other the nature of this learning appears to have been quite incremental and local that is not very far sighted we suggest how and when contracts might serve as repositories for knowledge about how to govern collaborations and suggest some boundary conditions for this phenomenon our findings also provide implications for the debate about whether contracts have a positive or negative effect on interorganizational trust we conclude with suggestions for future research

a note on probability distributions with increasing generalized failure rates distributions with an increasing generalized failure rate igfr have useful applications in pricing and supply chain contracting problems we provide alternative characterizations of the igfr property that lead to simplify verifying whether the igfr condition holds we also relate the limit of the generalized failure rate and the moments of a distribution

coordinating inventory control and pricing strategies with random demand and fixed ordering cost the finite horizon case we analyze a finite horizon single product periodic review model in which pricing and production inventory decisions are made simultaneously demands in different periods are random variables that are independent of each other and their distributions depend on the product price pricing and ordering decisions are made at the beginning of each period and all shortages are backlogged ordering cost includes both a fixed cost and a variable cost proportional to the amount ordered the objective is to find an inventory policy and a pricing strategy maximizing expected profit over the finite horizon we show that when the demand model is additive the profit to go functions arek concave and hence an s s p policy is optimal in such a policy the period inventory is managed based on the classical s s policy and price is determined based on the inventory position at the beginning of each period for more general demand functions i e multiplicative plus additive functions we demonstrate that the profit to go function is not necessarilyk concave and an s s p policy is not necessarily optimal we introduce a new concept the symmetrick concave functions and apply it to provide a characterization of the optimal policy

note the role of returns policies in pricing and inventory decisions for catalogue goods manufacturers often use returns policies to encourage retailers to stock and price items more aggressively we focus on the effect that such policies have on both a retailer s and a manufacturer s profits when the retailer must commit prior to the selling season to both a stocking quantity and a price at which to sell an item such a commitment is often necessary for retailers who sell primarily through catalogues

a behavioral resource based view of the firm the synergy of cyert and march 1963 and penrose 1959 cyert and march s 1963 seminal behavioral theory is one of the two major economics based theories of the firm that goes inside the black box the firm the other being the contribution of edith penrose the two theories have differences but also similarities and substantial scope for cross fertilization that has gone unnoticed in the literature in this paper we try to integrate important ideas from both books paying particular attention to the issue of excess resources slack and intrafirm conflict we then build on the integrated framework by delving into the nature of intrafirm conflict and its relationship to the degree of intrafirm rivalry as they may impact the possible use of slack by firms we derive propositions common to the two theories and new ones of importance to our understanding of organizational growth and change

effects of sourcing structure on performance in a multiple product assemble to order supply chain abstract this paper addresses the strategic pricing decisions of a decentralized assemble to order system and the effects of sourcing structure on system performance we consider an assemble to order system consisting of two substitute products and three components manufactured by different suppliers demand for the products is price sensitive the selling prices for the products are jointly determined by firms in the system we study the system under both centralized and decentralized decision making situations for the centralized system we demonstrate that there exists a unique optimal pricing solution for the decentralized system we show that there exists a unique nash equilibrium in the players pricing game we further analyze the effects of different sourcing structures on the system performance and the assembler s performance we find that reduction of suppliers in the system does not guarantee improvement of system performance different sourcing structures have different impacts on performance when the two dedicated components are sourced from a single supplier and the common component is sourced from another independent supplier the system and the assembler s performance become worse we show that the decentralized system can be effectively coordinated and the system performance can be improved with a simple profit sharing contract finally we provide comprehensive numerical examples to demonstrate some important managerial insights

competition in multiechelon assembly supply chains in this paper we study competition in multiechelon supply chains with an assembly structure firms in the supply chain are grouped into homogenous sectors nodes that contain identical firms with identical production capabilities that all produce exactly one undifferentiated product that may itself be a kit of components each sector may use several inputs to produce its product and these inputs are supplied by different sectors the production process within any sector is taken to be pure assembly in fixed proportions the number of firms in each sector is known the demand curve for the final product is assumed to be linear as are production costs in all sectors competition is modeled via a coordinated successive cournot model in which firms choose production quantities for their downstream market so as to maximize profits given prices for all inputs and all complementary products production quantities for sectors supplying the same successor are coordinated through pricing mechanisms so that complementary products are produced in the right proportions under these assumptions equilibrium prices for any multiechelon assembly network are characterized by a system of linear equations we derive closed form expressions for equilibrium quantities and prices in any two stage system i e a system with multiple input sectors and a single assembly sector we show that any assembly structure can be converted to an equivalent larger structure in which no more than two components are assembled at any node finally large structures can be solved either by direct solution of the characteristic linear equations or through an iterative reduction compression to smaller structures

a behavioral theory of market expansion based on the opportunity prospects rule what explains organizational search and choice when multiple opportunities are available to the decision makers drawing on the behavioral view of the firm and on the attention based view this study proposes a theoretical model centered on the opportunity prospects rule to explain market expansion defined as the extent how many and the selection which of multiple available opportunities that are actually pursued by competing firms we test our model using longitudinal fine grained data on commercial banks undertaking more than 1 300 opportunity choices the findings show that firms do use the opportunity prospects rule when exercising market expansion choices and that slack and performance feedback moderate the effects of opportunity prospects this paper contributes to organizational decision making research and to the behavioral view of the firm by showing the importance of considering an opportunity driven approach by demonstrating the relevance of simplifying rules to explain the search for the consequences of alternatives by extending recent efforts to provide a more forward looking perspective to model organization behavior and by showing when slack and performance feedback moderate the effects on market expansion of the opportunity prospects rule

optimal quality and quantity provisions for centralized vs decentralized distribution market size uncertainty effects abstract we provide insights on how market size uncertainty affects the optimal quality quantity provision in distribution channels when consumers are heterogeneous in their willingness to pay for product quality in this context we denote the difference between the manufacturer s optimal quality quantity provision for a centralized channel and its optimal analog for a decentralized channel as the quality quantity differential we find that market size uncertainty creates or increases the quantity differential but it does not affect the differential s polarity in contrast market size uncertainty decreases the quality differential and it does so to the extent that depending on the level of consumer heterogeneity it reverses the differential s polarity moreover we find that the higher the inherent uncertainty level the more pronounced are the effects we likewise find that the effects of market size uncertainty are amplified if the notion of consumer heterogeneity is replaced with retail level competition