In vertical relationships, manufacturers commonly rely on retailers to sell their goods. In this note, we analyze a manufacturer-retailer relationship in which a manufacturer delegates the sale of his product to a retailer who gets sequentially private information about the retail value of the...

While a broad branch of literature deals with the development of buyer-supplier relationships, limited research exists under which circumstances a buyer should terminate such a relationship and switch to a new supplier. Recently, Wagner and Friedl (2007) have developed a framework to analyze a...

Applying a real option approach, this paper examines how asymmetric information alters key variables of a firm’s supplier switching process, such as the timing of contracting (hurried versus delayed contracting), transfer payments, set-up, switching, and abandonment decisions. In a symmetric...

The prevalence of intermediaries (middlemen) in supply chains is often seen as a dying remnant of less efficient times. Despite predictions that supply chains will rapidly “cut out the middleman” as technological advances have eased logistics, middlemen have continued to thrive. In this...