Only Time Can Tell: Temporal Quality in Trade and Sourcing

Abstract

Temporal quality is a dimension of quality that only time can tell. When firms scale down their investment in temporal quality, their blueprints are less able to stand the test of time, necessitating their replacement by even newer blueprints, and generating an illusion for observers that firms have speeded up their innovations. We also investigate when will Northern firms invest more in temporal quality than Southern firms do, and how their choices of temporal quality interact with their global sourcing decisions.