Master's Thesis from the year 2020 in the subject Business economics - Business Management, Corporate Governance, grade: 2,0, University of Kassel, language: English, abstract: The purpose of this paper is to empirically demonstrate how information sharing is addressing issues of agency theory behaviour in the context of different supply chains. The contribution of this research is, on the one hand, to gain insights of multi-tier supply chain relationship structures of different companies. They aim is to analyse the transparency along the supply chain, which is affected by different behaviour of parties to each other. Afterwards, it is important to draw a conclusion of how supply chain information sharing addresses these issues of agency theory behaviour. Covid-19 is a pandemic that has led to a breakdown in supply chains. One of the reasons for this was the selfish behaviour of many consumers, who bought goods in mass quantities, which leads to empty shelves for the community. Especially in situations like these, it becomes clear how important it is to maintain a resilient supply chain, which can adapt quickly to unpredictable circumstances. A supply chain, which consists of at least of three parties, depends on every single member along the chain. In this way, it becomes more and more important to select the right supplier. Unfortunately, it is not easy to find the right supplier, as many individuals and organisations are driven by opportunistic behaviour and bounded rationality.

This book analyzes how and under what conditions collaborating corporations can effectively manage relationships with their suppliers in order to decrease the risk of suppliers’ noncompliance with codes of conduct and standards. In so doing, it represents an important addition to the management literature on corporate social responsibility in global supply chains – which is highly topical at a time when companies are increasingly aware of the social and environmental aspects of global sourcing. After an opening systematic review of the literature on agency theory and supply chain management, it explores the rationale underlying collaboration among competitors, and the most critical aspects of such collaboration, in depth. Thanks to the book’s use of real-life examples, readers will learn how agency theory can help improve relationship management and address the major issues in sustainable global sourcing.

The Fourteenth Edition of Purchasing and Supply Management provides a comprehensive introduction to the purchasing and supply chain management field, supported by over 40 case studies. Cases cover purchasing and supply chain issues in a variety of settings, from process industries to high tech manufacturing and services as well as public institutions. The text focuses on decision making throughout the supply chain. Based on the conviction that supply managers, in concert with suppliers and distributors, have to contribute to organizational goals and strategies, this edition continues to focus on how to make that mission a reality.

Lydia Bals identifies different types of offshoring, concluding that the buy option of offshore outsourcing versus hybrid or make options is directly related to purchasing. Her in-depth analysis specifically focuses on the sourcing of marketing services. In this context, the investigations of purchasing/marketing integration provide a conceptual model of barriers to purchasing involvement in sourcing of services. Moreover, she seeks to shed light on issues of providing incentives for advertising agencies from an agency theory perspective.

With the recognition of the criticality of information flow in the supply chain, much research has examined various pertinent areas such as information sharing and the use of IT applications, and generated valuable insights about how an organization could reap the benefits through an effective supply chain information flow by building on the implicit assumption that organizations in the supply chain cope with issues around supply chain information in a similar way, which would lead to the conjecture that the quality of supply chain information is equivalent across supply chain members. However, many organizations still struggle for poor information flow in the supply chain. This suggests that the implicit assumption made in the literature may not hold in practice. By challenging this unstated and flawed assumption, this dissertation adopts a governance perspective on supply chain information flow, i.e., information governance, and positions information governance in the realm of supply chain management. Specifically, this dissertation unpacks information governance by identifying its key elements and delves into the nature of the relationships between the key elements of information governance and supply chain performance. This dissertation further investigates the arrangement of the information governance and supply chain strategies and its performance implications in a hospital context. The findings of this dissertation contribute to facilitating an understanding of information governance in the supply chain context by providing theoretical and empirical support. Managerial implications and future research directions are also presented.

An extensive review of the current literature on supply chain management research shows that, traditionally, a supply chain is typically viewed as a hierarchical structure in which the information and materials flow in a vertical point-to-point fashion and each individual at a level is independent and does not interact with others horizontally. The methodologies often found are mathematical deduction or induction with, sometimes, numerical simulation or empirical data analysis to support the theories. These traditional approaches are very powerful and efficient in solving many problems. However, they are inadequate in the areas that the agent based modeling is capable of. These areas include capturing emergent phenomena; providing a natural description of a supply chain system; and being flexible (scalable and adaptive). This dissertation investigates the supply chain system in a way different from the traditional approaches. Our view of a supply chain is a hierarchical structure with horizontal layers, in which exist interactions between the members (retailers, in our case, who exchange information and stocks). We no longer treat the system as point-to-point, but point-to-layer relationships. We use the agent based modeling to represent in a more natural way the individual interactive entities in the supply chain system and investigate the emergence due to the interactions between these entities. In this dissertation we have demonstrated that interactions between retailers have plausible consequences on the supply chain performance. In particular, we look at the total average costs at the supplier side and find significant improvement in cost reduction as the interactions among the retailers increase. Through the external validation, we confirm that the new agent based modeling method produces the exact results as those from the previous research with traditional approaches. We use agents to represent the firms in the supply chain and program the behaviors for each agent by applying the existing mathematically proved functions. We also use the agents to demonstrate the bullwhip effect. We have shown that without information sharing, the supplier needs to periodically update the mean and variance of demand based on observed demand data through orders received from retailers, then the variance of the orders placed by the supplier will be greater than that by the retailer and in turn the demand. More importantly, providing sufficient information of the underlying demand to the supplier can significantly reduce this increase in variability.