The U.S. federal government spends huge sums buying goods and services from outside of the public sector. Given the sums involved, strategic government purchasing can have electoral consequences. In ...this article, we suggest that more politicized agencies show favoritism to businesses in key electoral constituencies and to firms connected to political parties. We evaluate these claims using new data on U.S. government contracts from 2003 to 2015. We find that executive departments, particularly more politicized department-wide offices, are the most likely to have contracts characterized by noncompetitive procedures and outcomes, indicating favoritism. Politically responsive agencies—but only those—give out more noncompetitive contracts in battleground states. We also observe greater turnover in firms receiving government contracts after a party change in the White House, but only in the more politicized agencies. We conclude that agency designs that limit appointee representation in procurement decisions reduce political favoritism.
Perception of the purchase budget N'da, Karamoko; Ge, Jiaoju; Ji-Fan Ren, Steven ...
PloS one,
07/2023, Volume:
18, Issue:
7
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
The study explores the direct and mediated impacts of customers' perception of purchase budget (BGT) on purchase intention (PIT) through perceived quality (PPQ), perceived price (PPR), and perceived ...benefit (PB) in a cross-country setting to understand BGT's role in predicting customer purchase intention in smartphone selling through international online shopping platforms. An online survey was conducted in Kenya, France, and the United States to gather data from 429 consumers who had recently purchased one or more smartphones through international online shopping platforms. SmartPLS-4 was used to test the hypotheses. Results for the entire sample showed a significantly positive mediating role of PPR and PPQ between BGT and PIT. However, the mediating roles of PPQ and PB were not significant in the samples from Kenya, France, and the United States. The results also showed that PPR plays a significant and positive mediating role between BGT and PIT in samples from Kenya, France, the United States, and overall. However, the direct relationships between BGT and PPQ, PPR, and PB are shown to be negatively significant.
Although many researchers in information systems and marketing have studied the effect of product reviews on sales, few have looked at their effect on product returns. We hypothesize that, by ...reducing product uncertainty, product reviews affect the probability of product returns. We elaborate this hypothesis starting with an analytical model that examines how changes in valence and precision of information from product reviews influence the purchase and return probabilities of risk-averse, but rational, consumers. We then empirically test our hypotheses using a transaction-level data set from a multichannel, multibrand North American specialty retailer. Harnessing different consumers’ purchases and returns of the same products, but with varying sets of product reviews over two years, we show that the availability of more reviews and the presence of more “helpful” reviews, as voted by consumers, lead to fewer product returns—after controlling for customer, product, and other context-related factors. Analyzing the purchase behavior of the consumers, we find that when fewer product reviews are available, consumers buy more substitutes in conjunction with a product, potentially to mitigate their uncertainty. Purchase of substitutes, in turn, leads to more product returns. Finally, leveraging a discontinuity in the displayed average ratings, we find that when products are shown with an average rating that is higher than the true rating, they are returned
more
often. These results support the predictions of our theoretical model—unbiased online reviews indeed help consumers make better purchase decisions, leading to lower product returns; biasing reviews upward results in more returns. The presence of online reviews has important cost implications for the firm beyond the cost of reprocessing the returns; we observe that when consumers return products, they are more likely to write online reviews and that these reviews are more negative than reviews that follow a nonreturned purchase.
The online appendix is available at
https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.2017.0736
.
No part of the world is untouched by workplace violations. As a result, governments involuntarily procure from contractors who have some involvement in illegal labor practices. Although many ...countries have denounced and prohibited the use of illegal labor, fewer have taken concrete steps to enforce the prohibitions and ensure the eradication of these practices in government supply chains. This Note argues that the United States should use the market power of its public procurement regime as a tool to promote regulation of labor violations, rather than continuing to rely on mandatory reporting and passive tools of prohibition. Through an analysis of recent successful implementations of social considerations in European procurement systems, this Note explores ways that the United States procurement system can similarly set more stringent enforcement mechanisms against labor violators. It finds solutions in adding social considerations to responsibility determinations, investigating and auditing contractors in high-risk sectors to ensure compliance with labor standards, and increasing the use of suspensions and debarments to deter noncompliance.
This paper introduces a special topic forum on “Sustainable Supply Chain Management.” Before introducing the papers included in the forum, the authors provide thoughts on the direction and future of ...sustainability research, particularly in the context of purchasing and supply chain management. The underlying premise that structures our discussion is straightforward: a company is no more sustainable than its supply chain. As such the purchasing function becomes central in a company's sustainability effort. In doing so, we reflect on the relationship between purchasing management and sustainable development by drawing from Kraljic's seminal article on how “Purchasing Must Become Supply Management.”
The environment may provide an essential variable to explain the strategic behaviour of companies, yet few works study its role in the formulation of strategies for the purchasing function. This ...article investigates the relationship among munificence, hostility, dynamism and complexity in the environment and the implementation of evaluation, development, involvement and logistics integration practices by suppliers. Several hypotheses, formulated on the basis of different approaches and theories developed in the fields of strategic and operations management, are tested with a sample of 96 industrial companies that conduct business activities in northeast Brazil. The results reveal a statistically significant relationship between the characteristics of the environment and the practices employed by the purchasing function; the hostility and the complexity of the environment are outstanding for their explanatory power.
In humanitarian operations management, a supply and purchasing issue has long plagued practitioners and scholars. A strategy that involves the purchase of relief supplies immediately after a disaster ...(instant purchasing) can reduce operational cost. However, purchasing price and possible supply scarcity are high because of the time urgency. Alternatively, pre-purchasing relief supplies is a strategy that is characterized by a low purchase price. However, this approach entails a loss associated with the uncertainty of demand and an increase in inventory cost. To resolve this problem, we introduce a supply chain methodology into humanitarian operations management by considering the system as a relief supply chain. We determine that pre-purchasing relief supplies from a supplier with an option contract is superior to both pre-purchasing with a buyback contract and instant-purchasing with a return policy. An option contract enables the coordination of a relief supply chain and the achievement of Pareto improvement. Additionally, with consideration of the risk level and preference, profit distribution with an option contract becomes acceptable for both the supplier and the purchaser.
