In this paper, we analyze the contracting issues that arise in collaborative services, such as consulting, financial planning, and information technology outsourcing. In particular, we investigate how the choice of contract type--among fixed-fee, time-and-materials, and performance-based...

In this paper, we quantify the efficiency of decentralized supply chains that use price-only contracts. With a price-only contract, a buyer and a seller agree only on a constant transaction price, without specifying the amount that will be transferred. It is well known that these contracts do...

In the supply-chain literature, an increasing body of work studies how suppliers can use incentive schemes such as quantity discounts to influence buyers' ordering behaviour, thus reducing the supplier's (and the total supply chain's) costs. Various functional forms for such incentive schemes...

Supply chains often consist of several tiers, with different numbers of firms competing at each tier. A major determinant of the structure of supply chains is the cost structure associated with the underlying manufacturing process. In this paper, we examine the impact of fixed and variable costs...

We study the global diffusion of ISO 9000 and ISO 14000 certification using a network diffusion framework. We start by investigating the presence and nature of contagion effects by defining alternative cross-country networks and testing their relative strength. Second, we study how the rate of...

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...