Search results

A study of the price discounts granted by Morton Salt Company and other producers of table salt in the U.S. on their sales of table salt to grocery wholesalers and retailers. The discounts were found to be illegal under the Robinson-Patman Act by the Federal Trade Commission and the Supreme Court. The Commission and the Court believed that the discounts were unjustified price concessions granted to “large” buyers, consistent with the concerns of the Robinson-Patman Act. However, the evidence indicates that the most common discount – the “carload discount” – was received by virtually all buyers, regardless of the buyer’s size; the other discounts – “annual volume” discounts – though received primarily by “large” buyers, were likely cost based. The history of the discounts and likely reasons why they were granted are explored in detail.

Almost all Supply Chain and Operations Management textbooks cover the topic of quantity discount analysis in an inventory management chapter. However, it is a challenging topic for many undergraduate students since the calculations are somewhat complicated and many students are uncomfortable with any math-related topic. In order to determine whether it is appropriate to take the advantage of the quantity discount, the classical one-step EOQ model is expanded to a multistep procedure, as all relevant textbooks illustrate when explaining the use of quantity discounts. This chapter demonstrates an alternative way to teach students in order to facilitate their understanding the topic more intuitively, and to allow the student to reach the optimal solution faster in most cases. Therefore, it is suggested that the method presented in this chapter may reduce students’ anxiety toward this topic. The simulation results show that with only two discount thresholds, this alternative method can save over 70% of the calculations. It can allow instructors to save time in the classroom and help students solve the problems faster when doing quantity discount problems on homework or exams.

Supplier selection is a complex and strategic activity needed in every organization, involving many stakeholders and different attributes as price, delivery performance, and product quality. Globalization, in the last decades, increased the competitiveness between vendors, enhancing the use of decision models to support the best choice based on optimizations and bidding variations due to specific needs. This chapter presents three models of multi-dimensional auctions to improve an international humanitarian NGO process procurement efficiency by reducing procurement costs and the decision-making process time. These models have the advantage to be easily implementable in typically complex environments where there is a large number of categories, suppliers, and other features.

The first proposed model uses combinatorial auctions and is suited for procurement, where suppliers can benefit from cost complementarity. The second one uses volume discount auctions and is suited for volumetric purchases, where discounts for large quantities are common. The third one is a multi-attribute model, which computes the best possible solution considering several criteria and can be used in case of complex purchases that involve various categories and trade-offs and are subject to spot prices.

Several design considerations for this type of auctions are reviewed, as well as the mathematical formulation to determine the best alternative (i.e., winner) that can be solved using simple tools like Microsoft Excel. The models are optimized by a mixed-integer programming, and the multi-attribute one is developed using multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA). All three models developed in this research showed superior results compared to the baseline, being between 9% and 20% more efficient than a regular supplier selection (singly choosing the lowest price) and improving the bidding compliance.

This is the first paper in a volume devoted exclusively to antitrust law and economics. It summarizes the other papers and addresses two issues. First, after showing that the federal courts generally view consumer welfare as the ultimate goal of antitrust law, it asks what they mean by that term. It concludes that recent decisions appear more likely to equate consumer welfare with the well-being of consumers in the relevant market than with economic efficiency. Second, it asks whether a buyer must possess monopsony power to induce a price discrimination that is not cost justified. It concludes that a buyer can often obtain an unjustified concession simply by wielding bargaining power, but the resulting concession may frequently – though not always – improve consumer welfare.

Juglar's entry on “commercial crises” appeared in Maurice Block's Dictionnaire général de la politique … avec la collaboration d’hommes d’État, de publicistes et d’écrivains de tous les pays.⁶ The dictionary went through two editions – in 1863 and 1873 (with a reprint of the second edition in 1884). One of the most remarkable features of these articles is that they sum up the 258 pages of the first edition of Juglar's Des crises commerciales in only 13 pages. Although they are not numerous, the changes that Juglar introduced in the second edition are important, as they testify to the work he did in that decade on banking and foreign exchanges.

This chapter covers three main concepts: it provides an overview of supply chain management (SCM), introduces the concepts of procurement and what is entailed within this function, and explains how inventory is managed. In the first section, SCM is considered broadly but also in the context of hospitality. The key roles and objectives of SCM as well as the significance of supply chain risk and disruption are considered. In the second section, the concept of sourcing is discussed. Sourcing is a critical function in any organization: without this, an organization would cease to operate. The importance of supplier selection is explored, with methods to make the most appropriate selection and for subsequently managing suppliers. Finally, the third section focuses on how inventory management can be optimized. Concepts such as economic order quantity (EOQ) and ABC analysis are explored, along with alternatives to traditional inventory management methods.

The present study is aimed at understanding the survival strategies of Subsistence-type Rural Independent retailers, henceforth called SRIs, in the Bottom-of-the-Pyramid (BoP) markets of developing economies through a qualitative study. SRIs constitute a pivotal channel of distribution of goods to BoP consumers living in the rural areas of developing economies. A process of long interviews was chosen for data gathering to allow SRIs to go into details to allow them to expound upon their beliefs, life-situations, and societal norms. Narratives were collected verbatim from SRIs. The concept of socio-economic embeddedness is used as the central concept to interpret and connect the elements, discerned from the narratives, into a conceptual framework. The aforesaid theory combines the neo-classical economic concept of utility maximization with behavioral economics and economic sociology. The analysis of the narratives is interpretive against the identified elements of the concept of economic embeddedness. The survival strategies of SRIs seem to stem from sociological, psychological, and utility-maximizing behaviors. The elements of SRIs’ responses to its environment provide valuable insights into their purchase motivations.

This chapter proposes a multiobjective model to design a Closed Loop Supply Chain (CLSC) network. The first objective is to minimize the total cost of the network, while the second objective is to minimize the carbon emission resulting from production, transportation, and disposal processes using carbon cap and carbon tax regularity policies. In the third objective, we maximize the service level of retailers by using maximum covering location as a measure of service level. To model the proposed problem, a physical programming approach is developed. This work contributes to the literature in designing an optimum CLSC network considering the service level objective and product substitution.

This chapter makes the case for companies to improve pricing operations that enable pricing strategies in any given set of market conditions by taking certain steps before embarking on large initiatives that can affect prices, such as mergers or acquisitions, continuous improvement efforts, breakthrough changes (e.g., business process redesign or new technology implementation), or large-scale reorganization. Starting with pricing-related challenges, we draw attention to the importance of pricing operations by clarifying how pricing operations differ from pricing strategy and also how they directly impact profitability. Companies should follow a four-step approach to precede any major initiative affecting pricing, including Assessment of their pricing processes, Analysis of these pricing operations before bringing about sustained changes, then making and implementing Recommendations that should include Training of functional teams, in short, through AART. We discuss how companies can implement AART with illustrative examples.