Modern traceability technologies promise simplified recalls, increased visibility, and verification of sustainable practices. However, the benefits obtained from traceability are conditional on technology adoption throughout a supply chain. Hence, traceability initiatives need to subsidize some early adopters within a network of supply chains to achieve broad diffusion. We address the problem of identifying this "seed set" and describe how the supply chain network structure affects the choice.

We design a behavioral simulation using a blockchain-enabled market for trading suppliers’ capacities among competing retailers. Retailers have different valuations for goods and order before knowing their demand. After demand realization, retailers can trade among themselves. While average initial orders do not differ significantly compared to the control group, significant improvements in inventory allocation and profits are achieved, and trading strategies arise that mitigate demand risk.

This study examines the impact of (a) leasing or selling decisions and (b) alternate supply chain forms (CSC or DSC) on digital piracy and supply chain profits. We develop an analytical model where supply chain members lease or sell digital goods in the presence of pirated goods in a two-period setting. We find that leasing digital goods to buyers has higher supply chain profit than selling in a CSC, and selling provides higher supply chain profit than leasing in a DSC.

For many information goods, longer publication cycles are more economical, but often result in less timely information. While the digitalization of publication processes makes shorter cycles more economically viable, in practice, not all competing firms choose to publish more frequently. In this paper, we use a game-theoretic model to determine how information providers choose publication cycles and prices under competition and inform publishers of adaptive strategies for digitalization.

In knowledge-intensive businesses, projects are often initiated by individuals, who may then look for collaborators to push their idea forward. What operating dynamics arise in equilibrium when the decision-making process on project ownership and project execution is decentralized? Using a stylized principal-agent model, we find that principal investigators have a tendency to keep ideas for themselves too much, but when they share the project ownership, they tend to over delegate.

Demographic and professional activity data on 227 Operations Management faculty in 22 U.S. public schools is compared to their base salaries (all 227 faculty) and total compensation (a subset of 15 schools and 150 faculty). A primary factor correlated with pay levels are “A” journal publications. Local school effects (cost of living), willingness to move institutions, taking on administrative duties, and achieving Fellow status in professional societies are all correlated with higher salaries.

Being operationally transparent is often misaligned with firms’ incentives. In such situations, regulators or industry watchdogs may impose operational transparency requirements on firms. In this study, we examine the impact of operational transparency on R&D novelty. Exploiting an exogenous shock in the US pharma industry, we show that increased transparency leads to less novel R&D bets. Our research not only contributes to operations management theory but also informs policy.

A financial constraint for R&D is an essential issue for a firm's operations yet often ignored in research. We analyze a supply chain consisting of a supplier and a manufacturer, where the latter has an R&D opportunity with limited resources. We show that the latter's profit can decrease even if it can afford more investment, referred to as the R&D conundrum. We investigate operational and information strategies, including upfront R&D investment and keeping its financial budget private.

Concurrent development strategies can enable a firm to gain the first-mover advantage by developing a new product faster. However, they usually entail upfront investments that the firm cannot recoup if the product failed to meet certain quality requirements. Using a two-stage duopoly model, we examine under what conditions a firm will adopt concurrent development strategy in equilibrium in view of uncertain product approval, time-sensitive consumer utility, and asymmetric competition.

When entrepreneurs introduce innovations, incumbents must respond, yet may fail to do so in due course. I characterize the incumbent's optimal policy, specifying the conditions under which an incumbent ignores the threat or decides to acquire or imitate the startup. Incumbent inertia may arise if the incumbent waits until the market is ripe or if it is ambivalent about the appropriate response. This second rationale has not previously been identified as a cause for incumbent inertia.

When composing their innovation portfolios, firms can rely on their internal R&D units and invest in projects that are promoted internally; or they can acquire projects that originated outside their boundaries. We ask: How should a firm allocate its scarce resources across the different sources? We investigate this decision by designing a stylized game-theoretic model, and we identify the firm’s optimal resource allocation policy.

Although the participation of firms in cooperative ventures that benefit all firms, such as industry alliances and generic advertising campaigns, has been well-studied in the literature, prior studies have not explored how the firms decide their participation levels when the underlying market conditions change. In this paper, we investigate the impact of boom and bust conditions of the market on two firms' strategic decisions, when they face the prospect of cooperating with their competitor.

Supply chain risks, despite being a well-developed theoretical concept, are difficult to empirically quantify. I develop a firm-level measure of supply chain risk exposure using textual analysis on a novel source of unstructured data: managers' discussions during earnings conference calls. Economically validated, the measure provides a credible quantification of firm-level exposure to supply chain risks, and can be reliably utilized as outcome or explanatory variables in empirical research.

Weather has a significant impact on the demand of various products. To improve the performance of the supply chain of weather sensitive products the main objective of the proposed research is to design new classes of contract that can outperform the widely used contracts, such as wholesale price, buyback, and revenue sharing contracts. . A firm’s objective under risk is measured by using the Conditional Value at Risk. Results show that the designed contracts outperform the traditional contracts.

Gathering information on risks in a supply chain is still a significant challenge for firms. However, firms are requested to disclose their material risks in 10-K reports, leading to a substantial amount of information on their risk status. It remains an unanswered question if the information is informative. Using the natural experiment presented by the COVID-19 pandemic and an event study methodology, our analysis provides evidence that risk disclosures are informative.

We examine the interplay between operational effort to increase supply chain resilience and financial arrangements such as buyer intermediated financing, buyer direct financing, and advance payments. We characterize conditions when those arrangements complement operational effort and when they are substitutes. We study when those arrangements lead to coordination or at least efficiency gains for buyers and their upstream supply chain.

Fixed-price freight contracts between firms and transportation providers are non-binding and often fail due to supply and demand uncertainties. We propose indexed pricing to reduce frequent unanticipated costs and supplier performance degradation. We show how to design these contracts for a Pareto improvement over traditional contracts, conduct an experiment with an agricultural firm to validate the models, and quantify the causal effect of indexed contracts on costs and performance.

Modeling of resilience and viability became crucial in case of supply chain disruptions. We discuss research-practice paradoxes and show that the categories of probability, adaptability, and time are major determinants of resilience and viability modeling. We stress the importance of reliable suppliers, disruption probabilities, disruption time and ripple effect estimation, value-creation perspective of resilience, and viability of intertwined supply networks.

We compare two microfinancing structures in developing countries where an entrepreneur with zero initial budget borrows a loan to start a business. The entrepreneur faces a Newsvendor problem with finance and effort considerations. We characterize conditions under which a community bank, which can apply social pressure on the entrepreneur to pay all of its debt back, improves individual and social welfare in comparison with a social bank, which has no such mechanism.

Loans can cause bankruptcy risk in capital constrained businesses. This study presents three data-driven contracts that enable us to capture the trade credit and bank credit risks by trade credit insurance and payment protection insurance, respectively. Analyses underscore the significance of using insurance services as risk hedging tools and ensuring the business continuity of supply chain players. Moreover, retailer prefers to receive trade credit if supplier purchase insurance services.

Reverse factoring is increasingly relevant in the industry and examined in academia. We complement the extant analytical studies on reverse factoring with empirical evidence and determine whether theoretical predictions of those models are consistent with industry practice. Some of our corresponding hypotheses are indeed supported, whereas in other cases, we find the opposite direction significant. Based on our analysis, we derive several implications for managers and researchers.

In this article, we investigate how the working capital management practice of a firm impacts its upstream and downstream supply chain partners.

We propose a Cash Conversion Distance (CCD) metric that identifies the degree with which a firm practices aggressive (or lax) working capital management.

We use secondary empirical data to show how firm's profitability as well as that of its partners varies as a function of this measure and its `importance' in the network.

Online platforms screen users who wish to benefit from their marketplaces. We show that when a platform transitions from private to public ownership, it will drop its screening standards, thus admitting otherwise unqualified users. Dropping standards ahead of an initial public offering allows platforms to increase their user base, leading stock investors to overvalue the stock (while imposing a cost on their users). We substantiate this hypothesis with data from p2p lending platforms.