WSU business professor publishes in top supply chain journal
Wayne State University School of Business Administration professor Tingting Yan has had a research article accepted by Decision Sciences, one of the top academic journals in the field of supply chain management.
The article, co-authored with Thomas Kull of Arizona State University, is titled "Supplier Opportunism in Buyer-Supplier New Product Development: A China-US Study of Antecedents, Consequences and Cultural/Institutional Contexts."
The article examines some of the intricacies of the relationship between suppliers and buyers, a complex relationship that becomes even more complex across different cultures and as greater uncertainty is entered into the product development process. A full abstract of the article is below.
Tingting Yan is an assistant professor of global supply chain management in the School of Business Administration at Wayne State University. She was recently named a "best reviewer" for the Journal of Operations Management and received the School of Business Administration’s 2014 Excellence in Research Award.
Title
Supplier Opportunism in Buyer-Supplier New Product Development: A China-US Study of Antecedents, Consequences and Cultural/Institutional Contexts
Abstract
Collaborating with a supplier in a buying firm’s new product development (NPD) project is commonly advocated and adopted, but does not always improve project performance. Some preexisting collaboration contexts, such as buyer-supplier NPD projects, are especially exposed to supplier opportunism due to the uncertain nature of the collaboration process. Adopting agency theory and transaction cost theory (TCT) perspectives, we examine (i) contextual antecedents and project consequences of supplier opportunism, and (ii) if these causal influences vary in different cultural and institutional contexts. Using a survey sample of 214 United States (U.S.) and 212 Chinese buying firms’ responses about buyer-supplier NPD projects, we find that supplier opportunism is significantly influenced by the task and relational contexts. We also show that supplier opportunism damages both design quality and efficiency, two aspects of project performance. When comparing U.S. to China, we find that task and relational contexts have a greater impact on supplier opportunism in the U.S., but design efficiency is less hurt by supplier opportunism there. Finally, we show challenges of preventing supplier opportunism in certain NPD collaboration contexts, and offer solutions for overcoming these challenges.
