Facing the urgent demand of medical devices for COVID-19 treatment, many automakers have recently begun manufacturing ventilators, even though they are inefficient in production and uninformed of demand variability. To help them, some incumbent ventilator manufacturers choose to voluntarily...

Motivated by dual sales channel operations in cross-border e-commerce, we analyze an e-tailer's strategic waiting decision for channel disruption information in a global supply chain. The e-tailer operates two sales channels: a bonded-warehouse channel with products pre-stocked before channel...

Nowadays, factories located in COVID-19 infected regions (e.g., Vietnam) are facing random outbreaks. If blockchain is adopted, then the outbreaks can be known immediately and emergency production shifting can be enabled, although high crash cost will be incurred. Otherwise, production delay...

To address the carbon lock-in problem, many developing countries have utilized multinational firms’ (MNFs’) mandatory carbon emission reduction requirements for the domestic manufacturers they source from, thereby triggering the latter’s investment in carbon emission reduction. But facing...

Imported agricultural product is not necessarily of higher quality than local product (e.g., pork containing ractopamine). Therefore, to improve brand image and increase market share, many overseas suppliers have adopted or are planning to adopt blockchain, where the production process without...

In e-commerce operations, many brands participate with platforms such as JD.com under the reselling mode because it is JD.com that undertakes the high-quality logistics service (e.g. quoting a short promised-delivery-time (PDT for short hereafter)) and consumers are generally more willing to pay...

When designing new products, firms face not only customer preference uncertainty, but also sophisticated social influence among customers. The social influence suggests that customers' decisions could be influenced by the mainstream view/opinion shared by the crowd; e.g., conformist customers...

Multinational firms (MNFs) that outsource production in the developing countries have been identified as the main contributors to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. These MNFs are therefore required to uphold sustainability goals, which propels the manufacturers in developing countries to make...

Consider a remanufacturing system consisting of a brand, a new component supplier (Supplier N), and a remanufactured component supplier (Supplier R). The brand priorly purchases remanufactured components and then assembles them into final products, while Supplier R collects the end-of-life...

Turbulent events such as the COVID-19 pandemic have caused severe disruptions to direct-delivery trade in cross-border e-commerce. For the e-tailers operating both bonded-warehouse and direct-delivery channels, self-reliant shipping will undoubtedly avoid the loss of control of logistics...