Since the early 2000s, there has been rapid growth in the number and spread of supermarkets in southern Africa. This paper is a synthesis of key findings of studies undertaken in Botswana, South Africa, Zambia, and Zimbabwe on the expansion of supermarkets and the impact this has had on...

This paper explores the effect of the spread of supermarkets on the participation of suppliers in supermarket value chains in Botswana and South Africa. Using secondary data and in-depth interviews with key players in the value chain, the paper evaluates the buyer power of supermarkets evidenced...

Over the past two decades, southern African countries have experienced rapid growth in the number and spread of supermarkets. Several factors have been attributed to this growth, including increasing urbanization, increased per capita income, the rise of the middle class, economies of scale and...

A national survey of firms that participated in outsourcing relationships was conducted, and service quality and relationship quality were found to be significantly and positively related to each other and both had a significant impact on user satisfaction. However, the intricacies of the causal...

Since the early 1990s international - or even global - outsourcing of intermediate products from suppliers has been propagated as a key means to improve the performance of firms. It is argued that becoming more lean and internationally focused is beneficial for the buyer as well as for the...

This paper considers a model with two competing supply chains where production costs are private information within a supply chain, but manufacturers can decide to share this information with the rival manufacturer. In contrast to existing literature, we study bottom-up negotiations, where...

This study analyzes the choice to interlock between two competing companies when their privately known marginal costs are correlated. The two rivals are organized into different business models: one delegates its production to a subcontractor, while the other is vertically integrated and carries...