Towards Counterfeit-Resilient Supply Chains: A Literature Review, Secondary Data Analysis and Research Agenda

Product counterfeiting is a significant supply chain problem: it provides a direct economic challenge to legitimate producers, undermines the signalling value of trademarks and threatens consumer welfare. It affects many industries, including automotives, aerospace and pharmaceuticals, where the infiltration of counterfeits has sometimes proven fatal. Although many OM studies have referred to the risks of intellectual property theft that arise in supply chains, the problem of product counterfeiting has generally been neglected. This paper analyzes the wider literature on counterfeiting, and a body of secondary case data, to develop a broad understanding of the causes and consequences of counterfeiting, and the strategies that counterfeiters have adopted. It then proposes a research agenda on the resilience of supply chains to counterfeiting. The agenda includes: (1) theoretical development of a counterfeit-resilience construct, based inter alia on agency and resource-based theory; (2) empirical work to: test current claims about the causes and consequences of counterfeiting, further explore the strategies employed by counterfeiters, examine effective anti-counterfeiting practices, and investigate the structural connections between legitimate and counterfeiting supply chains; and, (3) modelling work, to examine interrelationships between the decisions taken within legitimate and counterfeiting supply chains.