The World Is Flat [Updated and Expanded]: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century
The World Is Flat [Updated and Expanded]: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century
Simple Relational Contracts to Motivate Capacity Investment: Price Only vs. Price and Quantity
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
Supply Auctions and Relational Contracts for Procurement
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
Competing in a flat world: building enterprises for a borderless world
Competing in a flat world: building enterprises for a borderless world
Multimarket Facility Network Design with Offshoring Applications
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
Long-Term Contracts Under the Threat of Supplier Default
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
Second Sourcing vs. Sole Sourcing with Capacity Investment and Asymmetric Information
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
Contracting for Collaborative Services
Management Science
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
OM Forum---Business Model Innovation for Sustainability
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
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This paper provides a novel explanation for the use of supply chain intermediaries. We find that even in the absence of the well-known transactional and informational advantages of mediation, intermediaries improve supply chain performance. In particular, intermediaries facilitate responsive adaptation of the buyers' supplier base to their changing needs while simultaneously ensuring that suppliers behave as if they had long-term sourcing commitments from buying firms. In the face of changing buyer needs, an intermediary that sources on behalf of multiple buyers can responsively change the composition of future business committed to a supplier such that a sufficient level of business comes from the buyer(s) that most prefer this supplier. On the other hand, direct buyers that source only for themselves must provide all their committed business to a supplier from their own sourcing needs, even if they no longer prefer this supplier. Unlike existing theories of intermediation, our theory better explains the observed phenomenon that although transactional barriers and information asymmetries have steadily decreased, the use of intermediaries has soared, even among large companies such as Walmart. This paper was accepted by Martin Lariviere, operations management.