Responsible Sourcing in Supply Chains
研究了买方在负责任供应商与低成本但有违规风险的供应商之间的采购选择，分析了四种采购策略的适用条件，并发现提升消费者责任意识或供应链透明度可能适得其反，而加强执法和惩罚买方则能有效促进负责任采购。
We analyze the sourcing decision of a buyer choosing between two supplier types: responsible suppliers are costly but adhere to strict social and environmental responsibility standards, whereas risky suppliers are less expensive but may experience responsibility violations. A segment of the consumer population, called socially conscious, is willing to pay a higher price for a product sourced from a responsible supplier and may not purchase in the event of a responsibility violation from a risky supplier. We identify four possible sourcing strategies that a buyer might employ: low cost sourcing (sourcing from the risky supplier), dual sourcing, responsible niche sourcing (sourcing from a responsible supplier and selling only to socially conscious consumers), and responsible mass market sourcing (sourcing responsibly and selling to all consumers). We determine when each strategy is optimal and show that efforts to improve supply chain responsibility that focus on consumers (by increasing their willingness to pay for responsibility or increasing the number of consumers that are socially conscious) or increasing supply chain transparency may lead to unintended consequences, such as an increase in risky sourcing. Efforts that focus on enforcement and penalizing the buyer, however, never backfire and always lead to more responsible sourcing and less risky sourcing. This paper was accepted by Yossi Aviv, operations management.