Production and Operations Management最新文献

{"title":"Conflict and Contract Use in Cross-Cultural Buyer–Supplier Relationships: The Role of Cultural Context","authors":"J. Roehrich, Mehrnoush Sarafan, Brian Squire, Benn Lawson, Meriem Bouazzaoui","doi":"10.1177/10591478241265481","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10591478241265481","url":null,"abstract":"Conflict is common within global supply chains, especially where the buyer and supplier span different cultures. In such settings, formal contracts assume an important role in providing a common language that specifies each party's roles, responsibilities, and liabilities. However, the primacy, use, and interpretation of contracts is subject to the cultural norms of the two parties involved. We adopt a multi-method research design to understand how cultural context affects how suppliers interpret and respond to different contract functions (control vs. coordination) adopted by a buyer firm during conflict episodes. Study 1 involves multiple, in-depth case studies of conflict between three Indian suppliers and six of their international buyers from China, Germany, and the United States. Our findings highlight how the use of contractual control or coordination is interpreted differently depending on the supplier's cultural context. In particular, a mismatch in contract function use and the supplier's culturally derived expectations can lead to strong negative emotions and damage to the relationship. In Study 2, we propose and test a set of hypotheses via a scenario-based experiment of German and Chinese managers. We find support for our hypothesized conditional effects, showing that for suppliers from high-context cultures, the buyer's use of contractual control to address conflict has a significant negative, indirect effect on relationship commitment (via the emotion of anger). We conclude with a discussion of the implications of using contracts to manage conflict in cross-cultural supply chain relationships.","PeriodicalId":20623,"journal":{"name":"Production and Operations Management","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.8,"publicationDate":"2024-07-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141801807","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Group Buying Between Competitors: Exogenous and Endogenous Power Structures","authors":"Ke Fu, Guoming Lai, Weixin Shang, Jiayan Xu","doi":"10.1177/10591478241265483","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10591478241265483","url":null,"abstract":"Competing firms may engage in group buying (GB) to benefit from a quantity discount from a common supplier. We study GB under different power structures (i.e., Nash and Stackelberg) and investigate how the power structures can be endogenized along with the resulting GB outcome. We employ a game-theoretic framework in which two firms under Cournot competition can group their purchases if it is beneficial compared to individual purchasing. We show that under exogenous power structures, when the two firms have highly asymmetric market bases, Nash GB is unattainable due to severe co-opetition conflict, and Stackelberg GB can better resolve the conflict. Our results suggest that power structures may fundamentally affect firms’ GB incentives, and no power structure is always superior to others. We then endogenize the power structures of the two firms based on a two-stage extended game. Using Pareto-risk dominance, we identify conditions under which one firm endogenously emerges as the Stackelberg leader with the rival as the follower, as well as the conditions under which both firms endogenously choose Nash GB or opt for independent purchasing. We demonstrate that the two firms can largely resolve the battle for GB leadership and achieve an efficient outcome in most cases. Our study is the first to compare different exogenous power structures and consider endogenous power structures in the context of GB.","PeriodicalId":20623,"journal":{"name":"Production and Operations Management","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.8,"publicationDate":"2024-07-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141802165","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Selection of Small and Diverse Suppliers and Contractual Performance: Do Set-Asides Pay Off?","authors":"Mikaella Polyviou, Leopold Ried, R. Wiedmer","doi":"10.1177/10591478241265646","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10591478241265646","url":null,"abstract":"Despite formal supplier diversity initiatives and lofty goals, corporate spending with diverse suppliers is about 7%. Conversely, the U.S. federal government's spending with these suppliers exceeds 25%. The government's use of set-asides, which limit the bidding on certain contracts to small or small and diverse suppliers, is one reason that might explain this difference. Although set-asides entail socioeconomic benefits for these suppliers, they are controversial. Our study contributes to this debate by investigating the types of federal procurement contracts typically awarded to small and diverse suppliers and whether set-asides help these suppliers win more complex contracts. We also examine contractual performance in terms of cost overruns and delays for contracts performed by small and diverse suppliers versus other suppliers and contracts awarded to small and diverse suppliers through set-asides versus no set-asides. We test these effects by analyzing 38,417 procurement contracts awarded by all U.S. federal departments and independent agencies between 2011 and 2022. Our results show that small and diverse suppliers are more likely to be selected for less complex contracts. Set-asides, however, have a boosting effect, increasing the likelihood that these suppliers are selected even for more complex contracts. Moreover, contracts performed by small and diverse suppliers exhibit (a) similar cost overruns and delays as contracts performed by other suppliers and (b) lower cost overruns and shorter delays when awarded through set-asides rather than without set-asides. Our results have implications for the sourcing literature, small and diverse suppliers, and procurement professionals.","PeriodicalId":20623,"journal":{"name":"Production and Operations Management","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.8,"publicationDate":"2024-07-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141798942","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Information Transparency With Targeting Technology for Online Service Operations Platform","authors":"Ailing Xu, Y. Tan, Qiao-Chu He","doi":"10.1177/10591478231224963","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10591478231224963","url":null,"abstract":"Social technologies have enabled the emergence of online platforms that provide offline service consultations and recommendations. In this environment, economic inefficiency arises when customers are not fully aware of their horizontally differentiated preferences. With its expertise or data dominance, a platform can be more informed about customers’ hidden preferences. We focus on an instrumental social technology, that is, targeting, which is a type of data-driven personalized information provision to manipulate customers’ beliefs about service quality. We propose a Hotelling model wherein customers are sensitive to the delays for service while making Bayesian belief updates based on a platform’s recommendations. When customers self-select their favorite service, their choices impose negative externalities through congestion and welfare loss. Our results indicate that service recommendations allow customers to navigate toward the more appropriate service, thus improving matching efficiency, reducing congestion costs, and enhancing aggregate customer welfare. We further identify the role of “information transparency” and study how the platform should strategically release information by making personalized service recommendations to customers. Interestingly, when a customer-centric platform maximizes aggregate customer welfare, we identify the “value of opaqueness” by strategically withholding service recommendations from a subset of customers and notice that this effect is more pronounced for a profit-seeking platform. Our results offer a better understanding of information transparency policies in the joint design of service recommendation systems and pricing mechanisms.","PeriodicalId":20623,"journal":{"name":"Production and Operations Management","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.8,"publicationDate":"2024-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141804473","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"EXPRESS: Influencing Primary Care Antibiotic Prescription Behavior Using Financial Incentives","authors":"Salar Ghamat, Mojtaba Araghi, Lauren E. Cipriano, Michael Silverman","doi":"10.1177/10591478241264022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10591478241264022","url":null,"abstract":"Antibiotic resistance is an ongoing public health crisis fueled by overuse and misuse of antibiotics. The goal of this paper is to examine the impact of action-based incentive payments on reducing inappropriate antibiotic prescriptions in primary care, where thirty to fifty percent of antibiotic prescriptions are inappropriate. Various financial incentive programs to reduce the rate of inappropriate antibiotic prescriptions have been implemented and studied empirically. However, there have not been analytical studies to evaluate payment model contract design features and the potential for payment models to impact diagnosis decision making. We develop a stylized physician compensation model to study the interaction between a payer and a provider. The payer offers a payment contract, with a bonus tied to the prescription, to maximize social welfare, considering total costs of providing care and social harm from antibiotic resistance. Given the contract offered and their own opportunity cost associated with factors such as fear of misdiagnosis and time spent explaining to patients why antibiotics are not indicated, the provider chooses whether or not to prescribe antibiotics to patients for whom antibiotics are not clinically indicated. We consider four cases: when diagnostic accuracy relies on symptom presentation vs. additional diagnostic testing and when the opportunity cost of not prescribing antibiotics is public vs. private information of the provider. When there is no information asymmetry, an action-based incentive payment can coordinate care and achieve the first-best policy, decreasing the rate of inappropriate prescribing, even when incentive payments can affect the diagnosis behavior. However, when the diagnosis depends on additional testing, the first-best policy results in fewer inappropriate antibiotic prescriptions, when the test has high specificity. Therefore, when an accurate technical diagnostic is available, a simple to implement action-based incentive payment can be effective in reducing inappropriate antibiotic prescribing. In the realistic setting where the provider’s opportunity cost is private information, an action-based incentive payment cannot eliminate inappropriate antibiotic prescribing. In these settings, the introduction of point of care diagnostics to aid in objective diagnostic criteria will reduce the unintended consequences of the contract.","PeriodicalId":20623,"journal":{"name":"Production and Operations Management","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2024-06-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141363815","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"EXPRESS: Constrained Assortment Optimization under the Cross-Nested Logit Model","authors":"Cuong Le, Tien Mai","doi":"10.1177/10591478241263857","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10591478241263857","url":null,"abstract":"We study the assortment optimization problem under general linear constraints, where the customer choice behavior is captured by the Cross-Nested Logit model. In this problem, there is a set of products organized into multiple subsets (or nests), where each product can belong to more than one nest. The aim is to find an assortment to offer to customers so that the expected revenue is maximized. We show that, under the Cross-Nested Logit model, the unconstrained assortment problem is NP-hard even when there are only two nests, and the problem is generally NP-hard to approximate to any constant factors. To tackle this challenging problem, we develop a new discretization mechanism to approximate the problem by a linear fractional program with a performance guarantee of [Formula: see text], for any accuracy level ε > 0. We then show that optimal solutions to the approximate problem can be obtained by solving mixed-integer linear programs. We further show that our discretization approach can also be applied to solve a joint assortment optimization and pricing problem, as well as an assortment problem under a mixture of Cross-Nested Logit models to account for multiple classes of customers. Our empirical results on a large number of randomly generated test instances demonstrate that, under a performance guarantee of 90% (i.e., expected revenues are guaranteed to be at least 90% of the optimal revenue), the percentage gaps between the objective values obtained from our approximation methods and the optimal expected revenues are no larger than 1.2%.","PeriodicalId":20623,"journal":{"name":"Production and Operations Management","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2024-06-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141361605","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"EXPRESS: Fairness as a Robust Utilitarianism","authors":"Maoqi Liu, Qingchun Meng, Guodong Yu, Zhi-Hai Zhang","doi":"10.1177/10591478241262285","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10591478241262285","url":null,"abstract":"This article focuses on the social choice problem in which decisions are based on the utility of multiple stakeholder types. The sum of these utilities – Utilitarian welfare - is one of the most important objectives in solving the social choice problem. While it is the most efficient solution, maximizing Utilitarian welfare may lead to unfair outcomes. However, Encouraging a Utilitarian decision-maker to adopt a fair decision is challenging due to the associated efficiency loss. This article takes a novel perspective by motivating a Utilitarian decision-maker to make fair decisions from an uncertainty-averse standpoint. We study the problem where the proportions of stakeholder types are uncertain and propose a distributionally robust optimization (DRO) model that maximizes the worst-case Utilitarian welfare over an ϕ-divergence-based uncertainty set. We provide three aspects of the relationship between fairness and the uncertain-averse Utilitarian welfare maximization. First, we establish that the worst-case Utilitarian welfare adheres to all five axioms of unfairness-averse cardinal welfare functions with two stakeholder types and satisfies four of these when this number exceeds two. Second, we demonstrate that with the maximal extent of uncertainty aversion, the DRO model identifies the Egalitarian welfare maximizer, which prioritizes fairness. Further, given serveral conventional assumptions, the proposed model selects the Nash welfare maximizer, an objective trade-off between efficiency and fairness, with moderate levels of uncertainty aversion. Lastly, we present numerical studies of two specific instances of the social choice problem – resource allocation and facility location – to show that, as uncertainty aversion increases, our model increasingly emphasizes fairness.","PeriodicalId":20623,"journal":{"name":"Production and Operations Management","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2024-06-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141382338","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"EXPRESS: Financing and Farm-gate Pricing Strategies for Agricultural Cooperatives with Cash-constrained Farmers","authors":"Xiaoyan Qian, Quan Zhou, T. Olsen","doi":"10.1177/10591478241262279","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10591478241262279","url":null,"abstract":"Equity investment in agricultural cooperatives (co-ops) is typically limited to farmer-members; yet farmers are usually cash-constrained. In addition to the common stock that is held by farmer-members, many co-ops are changing their financial structure by raising equity from external investors. This helps co-ops to collect capital, but also brings to the fore the conflicting benefits of farmers and external investors. In this paper, we develop a two-stage game-theoretic model to examine a start-up co-op’s farm-gate pricing and financing strategies, considering two types of external fund: preferred stock that bears a fixed return rate and outside stock that shares the net profit (in proportion to equity) with common stock. We characterize the co-op’s strategies in different scenarios and generate the following insights. First, while both types of external equity outperform the case with common stock only, preferred stock generally outperforms outside stock due to its lower financial cost, higher tolerance for fund size limits, and flexibility in setting farm-gate prices. However, outside stock can outperform preferred stock if it allows a higher fund size limit. Second, the co-op’s financial strategy exhibits a similar structure in equilibrium regardless whether it is preferred stock or outside stock, despite their distinct financial terms. Finally, farm-gate pricing has a unique role in co-ops affecting the returns to farmers and external investors, which also highlights the conflicting roles of farmers as both patrons and investors when external equity is used.","PeriodicalId":20623,"journal":{"name":"Production and Operations Management","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2024-06-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141385359","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"EXPRESS: Consumer Social Connectedness and Persuasiveness of Collaborative-Filtering Recommender Systems: Evidence from an Online-to-Offline Recommendation App","authors":"Panagiotis Adamopoulos, Vilma Todri","doi":"10.1177/10591478241259422","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10591478241259422","url":null,"abstract":"Consumers often rely on their social connections or social technologies, such as (automated) system-generated recommender systems, to navigate the proliferation of diverse products and services offered in online and offline markets and cope with the corresponding choice overload. In this study, we investigate the relationship between the consumers’ social connectedness and the economic impact of recommender systems. Specifically, we examine whether the social connectedness levels of consumers moderate the effectiveness of online recommendations toward increasing product demand levels. We study this novel research question using a combination of datasets and a demand-estimation model. Interestingly, the empirical results show a positive moderating effect of social connectedness on the demand effect of online-to-offline recommendations. Further delving into the findings, we also provide empirical evidence that social identification might explain why denser social connectedness with local users accentuates the effects of collaborative filtering online-to-offline recommendations. Our study enhances the understanding of community factors affecting the efficacy of social technologies in multi-channel operations while also extending the social identity theory in operations in the digital realm. The results also have intriguing operational implications for operations managers and practitioners, while suggesting several interesting avenues for future research on social technologies and operations management.","PeriodicalId":20623,"journal":{"name":"Production and Operations Management","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141116480","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"EXPRESS: Information Sharing between Competitors with Endogenous Production Timing","authors":"Tian Li, Huajiang Luo, Weixin Shang","doi":"10.1177/10591478241259408","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10591478241259408","url":null,"abstract":"We study two competing firms’ incentives for demand information sharing and their production timing strategies. One firm adopts routine timing, where her production time is fixed according to her previous product models’ manufacturing time. The other firm uses strategic timing, where his production time can be strategically chosen to occur before, concurrently with, or after that of the routine-timing firm. The firms decide whether to disclose their private demand information and make quantity decisions based on the available demand information, either simultaneously or sequentially. We analyze the optimal production timing decisions for the strategic firm under different information sharing scenarios and find that a preemptive move is generally not optimal. We demonstrate that endogenous production timing can create incentives for information sharing and characterize the conditions under which both firms share information, one firm shares information, or neither firm shares information. Additionally, we uncover several interesting implications of information sharing under endogenous production timing: firms are more likely to share information in intensified competition, a firm may benefit from its rival’s superior information capability, and the option of information sharing enhances social welfare, which may also benefit from more intense competition.","PeriodicalId":20623,"journal":{"name":"Production and Operations Management","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141118055","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}