Dominant Supplier Research Articles

Learning‐by‐doing and contract choice

AbstractThis study examines vertical agreements that occur when suppliers experience learning‐by‐doing, which makes them more productive over time and poses a competitive threat to their rivals. Consequently, a dominant supplier arranges payments that reference the rival good. This study contributes to the existing literature by showing that the dominant supplier chooses specific contracts to reap optimal benefit from its rival's efficiency gains. These contracts restrict the rival, harm consumers, and reduce welfare when the rival is exceptionally efficient or expects significant improvements through learning‐by‐doing. Therefore, this study emphasizes the significance of foreseeable innovations and their implications in antitrust proceedings.

Effects of partial demand uncertainty reduction on private equity financing in small and medium-sized enterprises: A supply chain perspective.

The effect of demand uncertainty reduction (DUR) on supply chain management has received tremendous attention. From a financial perspective, studying the impact of DUR is equally significant. This study explores the relationship between DUR and private equity (PE) financing in retail enterprises within a supply chain, which comprises a dominant supplier and a subordinate retailer. This article establishes decision models for a retailer backed by PE under three market demand conditions: range, mean, and range with mean. The study further investigates the impact of partial demand uncertainty reduction (PDUR) on the retailer and PE through comparative analysis of these scenarios. To address incomplete market demand information during the decision-making process, the study employs the minimax regret criterion to construct and solve the model. An intriguing finding of this study is that contrary to intuition, PDUR not only fails to promote PE but also reduces the retailer's willingness to finance and decreases the asset size for both the retailer and PE. In addition, the better the growth potential for the retail enterprise, the more severe the negative impact brought about by PDUR. Moreover, the impact of PDUR on supplier and supply chain performance is two-fold. PDUR based on range information has a negative impact on the expected profit of the supplier and the supply chain, while PDUR based on mean information has a positive impact on their expected profit.

Tracking two decades of global gallium stocks and flows: A dynamic material flow analysis

Gallium (Ga) has recently garnered significant attention as a crucial byproduct element due to its crucial role in advancing low-carbon technologies and its globally imbalanced supply-demand. Understanding the global Ga flows and stocks can contribute to discovering ways to mitigate potential supply risks. In this study, we applied a material flow analysis to map the global Ga cycle from 2000 to 2021. Our results reveal the following results: (1) Over the past two decades, a cumulative 15.3% (313240.8 tons) of the total Ga reserves has been consumed through host metals (i.e., bauxite and zinc ores) mining. However, affected by actual demand, only 5549.7 tons of Ga have been extracted. Moreover, China has gradually become the dominant supplier of primary Ga globally, relying on its robust alumina industry. (2) The consumption pattern of global Ga is becoming increasingly complex. Driven by the diffusion of low-carbon technologies, primary Ga consumption has grown from 101 tons in 2000 to 432 tons in 2021. With a low material efficiency, only 2143.4 tons of Ga ultimately enter final products from semi-products. (3) The global Ga stock reached 956.7 tons in 2021 with significant recycling potential. However, commercial recycling systems were not established, and Ga resources in end-of-life (EoL) final products are mostly wasted. Given the anticipated growth of Ga demand, more coordinated efforts among different regions to promote technological innovation and improve recycling and circularity rates are urgently needed to ensure global Ga supply and a shared green future.

Single monopoly profits, vertical mergers, and downstream foreclosure

We review the Chicago school's single monopoly profit theory whereby an upstream monopolist cannot increase its profits through vertical integration as it anyway has sufficient market power. In our model the dominant supplier has full bargaining power, uses observable two-part tariffs, and is only constrained by a less efficient source (such as in-house production). We show that, by vertically integrating with a downstream incumbent, the supplier can profitably commit to pricing more aggressively if a downstream entrant refuses its supply contract. This can foreclose the downstream market. The anti-competitive effects arise from the seemingly pro-competitive elimination of double marginalization.

Selected Problems of the Automotive Industry—Material and Economic Risk

This article is a synthetic, brief review of the literature, reports and references on the transformation of the automotive industry into zero-emission cars, in particular electric cars. It analyzes the technological and economic aspects of changes in the automotive industry regarding the transformation to zero-emission cars. Despite great de-emission parameters, the production of electric cars does not have a zero carbon footprint. The acquisition of critical elements, their production and the production of other components and materials needed for their construction have an environmental impact. The supply chains of materials for the construction of batteries for electric cars are characterized by significant risks related to, among others, a lack of diversification and limited flexibility. The dominant supplier of rare elements for batteries is China. The article analyzes the impact of prices on the demand for electric cars and compares them to internal combustion cars. Research shows that most electric cars are sold in China, the USA and Europe (about 95% of the supply). The costs of cars are of great importance, which, given the current reduction in the purchasing power of consumers, make the forecasts of the dynamic growth of electromobility very cautious, and even stagnation in the purchase of electric cars is expected in the second half of 2023.

A path to build supply chain cyber-resilience through absorptive capacity and visibility: Two empirical studies

Little is known about cyber-resilience in supply chain management. Using two empirical studies, this paper examines how visibility impacts cyber-resilience in times of data breaches. Two new antecedents (power and absorptive capacity) are introduced to see how they impact cyber-resilience through visibility. The social exchange theory provided theoretical explanations for the relationships. Findings in Study-1 revealed that powerful buyers and supply chain absorptive capacity contribute to visibility to create cyber-resilience, while dominant suppliers are reluctant to share information in visibility practice. In a scenario-based experiment on supply chain and operations managers, we scrutinized the role of visibility by manipulating timeliness and accuracy in Study 2. Study 2 revealed that supply chain and operations managers believed that companies and their suppliers could avoid, maintain, and recover from disruption when real-time information is available.

Market Integration through Smuggling: China's Sanction on Norwegian Salmon

Popular press accounts and the political-economics literature link awarding the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize to a Chinese dissident to China's trade sanction on Norway's whole, fresh/chilled salmon exports. Norway lost its dominant supplier share of the Chinese market as its total salmon exports to China decreased. Then, in 2011, Vietnam dramatically increased its imports of Norwegian salmon. A structural break divides the data series into two sub-periods: July 1997 to February 2011, and March 2011 to December 2018 (the sanction period). This provides statistical evidence of China imposing an unannounced trade sanction. During the sanction period, Vietnam's current monthly imports are negatively affected by China's lagged monthly imports. A decrease in China's previous monthly salmon imports from Norway "Granger causes" an increase in Vietnam's current imports. No such relationship existed before the sanction, implying that China and Vietnam's salmon markets became integrated through smuggling.

Gamma Scientific Sets High Standards for Light Measurement

Gamma Scientific Sets High Standards for Light Measurement

How does IT capability affect knowledge acquisition in the presence of a dominant supplier?

PurposeThis study aims to examine how three types of information technology (IT) capability (supplier technological capability, customer technology-sensing capability and relatedness of IT infrastructure) facilitate knowledge acquisition by the customer when the supplier is dominant in the supplier-customer relationship.Design/methodology/approachThe unit of analysis was project. The authors designed two different questionnaires that were responded by the project manager of an enterprise resource planning (ERP) software supplier and the contact person of the customer organization in the same project, respectively. The two questionnaires were matched by means of project name. The final sample included a total of 136 projects. The authors used ordinary least squares to test the research hypotheses.FindingsThe authors found that supplier power advantage negatively influenced knowledge acquisition by the customer. The three types of IT capability did not have direct impacts on knowledge acquisition. The moderating effect of customer technology-sensing capability was not significant either. However, supplier technological capability and relatedness of IT infrastructure attenuated the negative effect of supplier power advantage on knowledge acquisition, indicating that both factors promoted knowledge acquisition.Originality/valueKnowledge acquisition is important for the success of software implementation in the supplier-customer relationship. There is limited evidence in the literature on how to apply externally oriented IT capability to enhance knowledge management, improve knowledge acquisition and manage the business relationship that is typically dominated by the software supplier. The authors provide evidence to examine related issues.

MaaS (Mobility as a Service) market futures explored

The term Mobility as a Service (MaaS) refers to a seamless, single interface, fully integrated and customised transport service. Whilst the technological barriers to implementing MaaS are steadily being overcome, less is known about how the MaaS eco-system might evolve. This paper unpicks the MaaS concept in light of broader societal trends to suggest how it could evolve and offers insights for practitioners and policy makers. The paper draws on relevant literature, together with discussions with stakeholders, to better understand how MaaS has emerged. It then constructs four future MaaS market scenarios and identifies implications. It is concluded that current expectations of how the MaaS concept may evolve are limited in their understanding of how the transport system could change should MaaS be adopted on a wide scale. The major challenges for policy makers will likely relate to balancing the promised benefits offered with issues such as safety (including bio-safety in our post Covid-19 world), data security and privacy, equity and the threat of dominant suppliers distorting the marketplace. Together, these insights suggest that the MaaS reality may be messy and difficult to manage, and that future transport systems might look very different to now.

Resilient sustainable investment in digital education technology: A stakeholder-centric decision support model under uncertainty

Investment in education technology (EdTech) is a complex decision problem for universities during the post-Covid era. With the objective to assess the quality and adoptability of education supply chain, a novel analytical evaluation model approach is proposed, based on quality function deployment and combinative distance-based assessment. To deal with uncertainty in the evaluation process, fuzzy theory is integrated into the model. To establish the house of quality matrix, technology-based stakeholders' requirements were identified and classified in four dimensions: economic and financial, technology adoption, sustainability, competencies. Moreover, nine supplier criteria were assumed. Based on expert evaluations, the results suggest that financial credit and supplier collaboration are the most prominent attributes to evaluate suppliers, while environmental commitment is sorted as the least important criterion. The results reveal that the three dominant suppliers, which provide the best response to the identified criteria, are providers of cloud service technology.

Time Bomb from the West: Video, the Advertising Industry, and Consumer Culture in Late-Socialist Czechoslovakia

Time Bomb from the West: Video, the Advertising Industry, and Consumer Culture in Late-Socialist Czechoslovakia

One hundred years of cobalt production in the Democratic Republic of the Congo

Cobalt is an indispensable element for the manufacture of strategic technologies including advanced batteries, jet engines, rare-earth permanent magnets, petroleum catalysts, and tool parts that enable construction, manufacturing, and mining. Cobalt routinely scores high in mineral supply risk assessments due to the concentration of cobalt mine production in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). This stands in contrast to the fact that DRC cobalt mine production had a 20% compound annual growth rate from 1995 through 2020—in large part due to investments by Chinese firms beginning in the mid-2000s. Given this continuous growth, one may ask why this supply is perceived to be so risky. This analysis illuminates the causes of historic disruptions to DRC cobalt mine and refinery production by analyzing country-level production, historical reports, and cobalt prices back to 1924. The results indicate that the main causes of supply disruptions were damage to transportation routes, underinvestment in maintaining nationalized mining assets, and the disintegration of the DRC economy during the early 1990s. On the other hand, cobalt mine production increased 50% from 1977 to 1979 despite two secessionist conflicts in DRC's cobalt producing region and increased seven-fold from 1996 to 2003 despite two African wars over the DRC and its resources. These results indicate that—barring another economic disintegration or mining industry nationalization—DRC mine production will likely continue to be the dominant supplier of the world's growing demand for cobalt in lithium-ion batteries. These results also indicate that sustained development of transportation (and other) infrastructure in Africa, as well as support for good governance in the DRC may prove key to the continued stability of DRC cobalt mine supplies.

Crude oil footprint in the rapidly changing world and implications from their income and price elasticities

Oil demand's income and price elasticities are important behavioral parameters for policy making. Despite its popularity in research, few studies investigated the elasticities of consumption-based oil demand, i.e., the amount of crude oil required to meet a nation's final demand regardless of the location of extractions, namely the oil footprint. Here we quantified the oil footprint of 49 countries/regions from 1995 to 2017 and estimated the elasticities of oil footprints using the panel Autoregressive Distributed Lag model. The results reveal the oil connections among countries hidden in the non-oil trade: the United States, China, and Japan imported a large amount of virtual oil embodied in the commodities and services, while Canada and Russia are the dominant suppliers. The elasticity estimations on 30 OECD countries show that oil footprints are more responsive to income increases in the long run than their short-run counterpart, with the elasticities around 0.75 and 0.48, respectively. Tariffs on oil products might not curb the oil footprint as the price elasticities are not robustly significant or negative. Moreover, the divergent elasticities of oil footprint by consumption categories highlight that more attention should be paid to the surge of oil demand embodied in construction, manufactured products, and services.

Recognize the bias? News media partisanship shapes the coverage of facial recognition technology in the United States

Media exists as the primary route through which the public learns about new technologies and thus plays an important role in shaping public sentiments. This article examines the influence of news media partisanship on the coverage of the controversial artificial intelligence (AI) technology facial recognition. A mixed-methods content analysis of news articles ( N = 451) from 23 US-based news outlets highlights the emergence of several frames in coverage of facial recognition pertaining to issues of privacy and surveillance, bias, technology’s ability to provide solutions, and its problematic development and implementation. Coverage was differentiated by partisanship, whereby left-leaning media focused more on ethical problems associated with the technology compared to their right-leaning peers who highlighted its abuses by foreign governments. Right-leaning media also referred more to technology’s positive uses, such as helping law enforcement, compared to left-leaning media. Finally, AI companies were the most dominant suppliers of information to the media regarding the technology.

What's in it for me? The occurrence of supplier innovation contribution in the context of supplier-dominant innovation: The supplier's perspective

Prior studies have pointed out the pivotal role supplier innovation contribution plays in supporting buyers' product innovation. Many studies focus on situations where the buyer occupies a dominant position; they posit that the dominant buyer can secure supplier innovation resources through collaborative relationships. However, the buyer may lose the privilege to mobilize supplier innovation contribution in the supplier-dominant innovation context. The issue of why the “dominant” supplier attempts to contribute innovation resources is less extensively explored. To fill this gap, this study examines the issue from the viewpoint of the supplier as the provider of innovation contributions. A survey of 358 paired firms in China indicates that black-box supplier involvement can induce supplier innovation contribute, only if the supplier has perceived relationship benefits. Moreover, the relationship between relationship benefits and supplier innovation contribution becomes stronger as renqing, xinyong, or supplier innovation value increase, but becomes weaker as ganqing or mianzi increase. This study provides practical guidance to buying firms regarding how they can mobilize the dominant supplier's innovation resources more effectively.

The rise of the autocratic nuclear marketplace

ABSTRACT The United States established itself as the dominant supplier of civil nuclear technology in the 1960s. But Moscow soon caught up, supplanting Washington after the Cold War. What led to the rise of this autocratic nuclear marketplace? We identify two factors. First, polarity shapes the motives for states to pursue civil nuclear exports. The superpowers faced strong motivations under bipolarity, but unipolarity put greater pressure on Russia to compete for influence with nuclear exports. Second, regime type affects state capacity to execute this strategy. We find that Moscow enjoyed an autocratic advantage, which insulated its nuclear industry from domestic opposition.

Detrital zircon U-Pb geochronology of the Xining loess in the northeastern Tibetan Plateau

Based on age distributions of detrital zircon in different sedimentary layers of the Xining loess, we analyzed temporal provenance variations of the Xining loess and possible spatial variations between loess records in northeastern Tibetan Plateau and in the hinterland of the Chinese Loess Plateau (CLP). The results show that there are no obvious long-term temporal variations in provenance of the Xining loess since ∼1.3 Ma, although the relative contribution of detritus from the Central Asia Organic Belt (CAOB) and the Northern Tibetan Plateau may slightly vary through time. Comparison of the zircon U-Pb age spectra between the Xining loess and loess in the western-central CLP demonstrates that their sediment provenances are almost consistent except for the absence of <190 Ma zircon group in Xining, probably implying that the hinterland of the CLP may have received more eolian dust from the CAOB compared with the Xining areas. Our results corroborate the view that the northeastern Tibetan Plateau is one of the dominant suppliers of detrital materials to the CLP besides the CAOB.

Retailer's Optimal Ordering and Financing Policies under Two -Level Credit Ratings

Different from bank credit rating, the dominant supplier usually ranks retailers to different credit ratings according to their transaction history, such as their order quantities. In this paper, the retailer is ranked either at low credit level or high credit level according to the retailer's historical order quantities. The retailer with low credit rating can only operates from hand to mouth whereas the retailer with high credit rating can apply for partial trade credit as well as a bank loan through the credit guarantee provided by supplier. We analytically derive the retailer's optimal ordering and financing policies. The trade credit and bank financing model is shown to be better off than self-financing model in terms of the retailer's optimal ordering. Hence it is worth to implement credit rating differentiation by the supplier. Observing from the retailer's ordering behavior, the upstream supplier can gain more information on its downstream's capital position through differentiating the credit level by ordering.

Selecting online distribution modes for differentiated products in a platform supply chain

E-commerce platforms can either serve as product resellers or provide online marketplaces. Selecting the better of these two online distribution modes or applying the combination of them has always been a critical issue for a supplier. The present work aims to assist a dominant supplier manufacturing differentiated products in determining the best online mode under different distribution strategies. Starting from the selective marketing strategy, three models matching products with individual modes are respectively formulated and studied for equilibria. The research is then extended to the intensive marketing strategy, where the combination of modes for each product is addressed. Our analytical results reveal that the mode selection highly relies on a product's inherent attribute, defined as the Cost-Market-Substitution (CMS) factor. Both the commission rate and slotting fee can be functioned as important moderators for relieving the conflict of distribution modes. The optimal commission rate to maximize the win-win region is shown to be highly dependent upon the substitution intensity across the differentiated products, and hence can be attained accordingly.