This paper analyses price competition between two firms producing horizontally and vertically differentiated goods. These are assumed to be credence goods, as consumers can hardly ascertain the quality of the commodities. We provide sufficient conditions for the existence of a unique price...

This paper surveys recent contributions on the Internalisation issue, based on different theories of the firm, to show how the make-or-buy decision, at an international level, has been assessed through the opening up of the “black box” - traditionally explored by the theorists of the firm...

Over the past three years Italy has witnessed a rapid growth in the photovoltaic energy market, followed by an equally sudden decline when the government decided to reduce the incentives. This sharp change in the trend of the market calls into question the achievement of Grid Parity and the...

Expanding variety and the number of offered products is attractive for a firm to fit customer needs. Nevertheless, the greater complexity and the proliferation of stock-keeping units (SKUs) without substantial differentiation may not substantially improve customer satisfaction while raising...

The aggregate black-box approach of conventional Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) limits its usefulness in situations where the observation is the result of independent decision making in sub-units (sub-DMUs), sequentially linked through processes or semi-finished products. The situation is...

Effective supply chain management relies on information integration and implementation of best practice techniques across the chain. Supply chains are examples of complex multi-stage systems with temporal and causal interrelations, operating multi-input and multi-output production and services...

Supply chain management involves the selection, coordination and motivation of independently operated suppliers. However the central planner's perspective in operations management translates poorly to vertically separated chains, where suppliers may have rational myopic reasons to object to full...

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is a powerful tool for measuring the relative efficiencies of a set of decision making units (DMUs) such as schools and bank branches that transform multiple inputs to multiple outputs. In centralized decision-making systems, management normally imposes common...

An important aspect of Total Quality Management is to inspect work in process after each operation. One of the reasons to do this is that a quick feedback to the operator of the information gathered during inspection can greatly help in improving quality levels at that operation. This paper...

The paper is concerned with instructions as a way of setting premises for subsequent decisions in models of teams à la Marschak-Radner, under information diversification. The paper suggests that instructions can bridge people’s differences in knowledge: they do not require mutual...