This paper addresses the concept of quality risk in outsourcing. Recent trends in outsourcing extend a contract manufacturer's (CM's) responsibility to several functional areas such as research and development and design in addition to manufacturing. This trend enables an original equipment...

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to use a unique, hand-collected data set of Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved products to understand the effect of lobbying on the product market. The authors gather total 86,462 FDA labels including drug patents, drugs, pre-market approvals and...

Do firms respond to cost shocks by reducing the quality of their products? Using microdata from a large Russian retailer that refreshes its product line twice-yearly, we document that higher quality products are more profitable than lower quality ones, but that the number of high quality...

Acceptance sampling is often used to monitor the quality of raw materials and components when product testing is destructive, time-consuming, or expensive. In this paper we consider the effect of a buyer-imposed acceptance sampling policy on the optimal batch size and optimal quality level...

Every organization's response to environmental challenges is to improve quality by adopting modern concepts and a new approach to quality. This includes, of course, the developed and implemented quality management systems. Ensuring quality and managing it today is an inevitability, so a great...

Organizations exist to create value for their stakeholders that stakeholders cannot create through individual effort. Information systems exist to increase an organization s ability to create value using intellectual capital. A theoretical explanation of value might therefore be useful to...

In the German automobile industry the vertical integration, as an indicator of value added, is on average low. Beyond the argument of relative high labour costs for manufacturing, several specific reasons for the level of vertical integration, linked to the flexibility of business administration...

Many two-sided platforms (e.g., eBay, Google, iOS, Android, Twitter, Amazon) provide integration tools, such as modular interfaces, interactive development environments, application programming interfaces (APIs), and help desks to reduce the costs and improve the functionality of third party...

At which stage in the production chain should patent licensing takes place? In this paper we show that under realistic circumstances a patent holder would be better off by licensing downstream. This occurs when the licensing revenue can depend on the downstream value of the product either...