Buyers have two levers to enhance their supply base performance: fostering supplier competition and inducing suppliers to improve. The competition-improvement relation between the two levers has important implications for supply base design. We study a buyer facing two potential suppliers that...

While offshore outsourcing has become an important strategy to lower production costs among Western firms, it gives rise to the phenomenon of value chain climbing – suppliers in emerging markets can develop capabilities by supplying, with aspirations to compete with the buyers in the product...

A buyer engages a procurement service provider (PSP) to short-list pre-screened suppliers for final selection. The PSP can exert costly effort to include promising candidates that have a higher probability to be deemed qualified by the buyer. The buyer optimizes two key decision variables in her...

We consider sealed and open-bid total-cost procurement auctions where two attributes are used for contract award decisions: price, which is bid by the supplier; and a fixed quality adjustment cost, which is included by the buyer to capture non-price factors such as a supplier's quality and...