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Gaining a competitive advantage in international supply chains requires matching the value‐adding activities of a chain with the unique comparative advantages offered by diverse nations that make up the chain. To do this, a supply chain manager must identify and control the factors that influence the performance of the chain in each of the three areas, namely, procurement, processing and distribution. Controlling these factors requires, among other things, setting up suitable information systems. This article provides a checklist of factors and offers suggestions for international supply chain managers to gain competitive advantage.

Empirically observed violations of traditional expected utility theory have prompted several new theories, putting the future of decision analysis at the crossroads. This essay describes the current status of the literature through selected examples of decision making scenarios. It concludes that if all relevant consequences of all alternatives are included in the analysis, then expected utility theory would prove to be valid. Practitioners who use techniques or software based on expected utility theory need only to make sure that they have considered all relevant consequences, and need not worry about the new non‐expected utility theories.

In this paper, we propose a set of standard benchmarks for evaluating B2B supply chain information systems. The supply chain management systems that we focus on communicate between collaborating partners via the Internet using such languages as the extensible markup language. We divide the benchmarks into three distinct categories: benchmarks to study the performance of querying a partner's data, modifying a partner's data, transmitting large amounts of data between partners. We propose a model for estimating the data‐communication and computation times incurred by the B2B information system using the above benchmarks. In addition, we discuss an algorithm for equitable sharing of the costs of a virtual private network by the partners. We present numerical examples to describe an actual application of the above models.

To present a support system which will be useful to mediators of brownfield redevelopment negotiations between government and industry representatives.

The support system optimizes a weighted utility function of the parties involved in the negotiation. It provides not only the optimal solution but also some sensitivity reports which the mediator can use to lead the negotiations in the most effective direction.

The spreadsheet technology is sufficient to solve the optimization problem and produce sensitivity reports in real time. Consequently, a mediator equipped with a laptop computer can lead the negotiations efficiently.

It is possible to achieve Pareto optimal contingent contracts among the stakeholders of brownfield redevelopment projects.

Many negotiations that were stalled in the past could be completed successfully using the support system presented here. New negotiations might be completed more efficiently than without the system.

This is the first paper to offer detailed guidance to mediators of brownfield redevelopment projects.