In this article an application-oriented approach to analyze the cost of conformance of services, i. e. ‘cost of customer satisfaction’, is presented. Contrary to quality costing methods in manufacturing industries, which are concerned about objective quality standards, services have to...

With the ongoing trend of mass-customization and an increasing product variety, just-in-time part logistics more and more becomes one of the greatest challenges in today’s automobile production. Thousands of parts and suppliers, a multitude of different equipments, and hundreds of logistics...

This paper explores the long-term partnership benefits of local strategic alliances in the software industry. A structural model of the value continuum is formulated and tested on data from small and midsize enterprises in Germany. Partial Least Squares Analysis is used to investigate the...

This paper analyzes North-South technology transfers in a model of oligopolistic competition and spatial product differentiation. Two firms in the North supply a high-tech good and a technically related low-tech good. They decide about licensing the low-tech good to suppliers in the South. With...