There are many materials for which the quantity needed by a firm is at best indirectly related to the quantity of final product produced by that firm, such as solvents in manufacturing processes or office supplies. For any such "indirect" materials, an inescapable incentive conflict exists: The...

The ISO 9000 series of quality management systems standards, introduced in 1986, has been adopted at over 560,000 locations worldwide. Anecdotal evidence suggests that firms can achieve internal benefits such as quality or productivity improvements or that certification can help firms maintain...

This paper studies the value to a supplier of obtaining better information about a buyer's cost structure, and of being able to offer more general contracts. We use the bilateral monopoly setting to analyze six scenarios: three increasingly general contracts (wholesale-pricing schemes, two-part...

This paper is inspired by the recurring mismatch between demand and supply in the U.S. influenza vaccine market. Economic theory predicts that an oligopolistic market with unregulated but costly entry will experience excess entry and oversupply, not the undersupply observed in the market for...

The ISO 9000 series of quality management systems standards is widely diffused, with more than 560,000 sites certified in 152 countries as of December 2003. Anecdotal evidence suggests that global supply chains contributed to this diffusion, in the following sense. Firms in Europe were the first...

Eppen (1979) showed that inventory costs in a centralized system increase with the correlation between multivariate normal product demands. Using multivariate stochastic orders, we generalize this statement to arbitrary distributions. We then describe methods to construct models with arbitrary...

We study competition between two multiproduct firms with distinct production technologies in a market where customers have heterogeneous preferences on a single taste attribute. The mass customizer (MC) has a perfectly flexible production technology and thus can offer any variety within a...

The literature on mass customization generally focuses on the tradeoff between higher revenues from better matching customer preferences with product specifications, and higher costs of offering a broader--possibly fully customized--product line. Less well understood is the tradeoff between the...

The view that adopting an environmental perspective on operations can lead to improved operations is in itself not novel; phrases such as "lean is green" are increasingly commonplace. The implication is that any operational system that has minimized inefficiencies is also more environmentally...