Journal of Operations Management最新文献

E. C. Falcone and J. W. Ridge, “An Investigation of Corporate Social Responsibility Conformity: The Roles of Network Prominence and Supply Chain Partners,” Journal of Operations Management 70, no. 4 (2024): 600–629.

In the second paragraph on page 616, the text “The results are consistent with H3 as the coefficient of the interaction term Network prominence ² * SC industry CSR congruence shows a positive and significant effect (β = 0.313; p < 0.01).” This is incorrect. The β = 0.313 should be β = 0.640.

We apologize for these errors.

We investigate how innovation intermediaries address shortfalls in the capabilities that buyers and suppliers must have to access each other's knowledge for innovation purposes, also referred to as indirect capabilities. Prior research on supplier-enabled innovation has identified various capabilities that buyers need in order to collaborate with innovative suppliers. It recognizes that suppliers also require capabilities to access buyer knowledge. However, we still know little about the role of innovation intermediaries—actors who are neither buyers nor suppliers, but still influence innovation processes and outcomes in supply networks. Our case-based research shows that intermediaries create workspaces for R&D and experimentation, help to refine definitions of requirements and de-risk novel solutions, support contracting, and facilitate solution implementation. We contribute to research on supplier innovation by developing a model of intermediaries' activities and underlying capabilities, and their impact on innovation sourcing outcomes. We elaborate the indirect capabilities theoretical perspective by introducing additional types of indirect capabilities for collaborative innovation in supply chains, and showing how these capabilities interrelate. We furthermore extend the literature on innovation intermediaries by elucidating hitherto unexplored capabilities for intermediation and adding insights regarding the contribution of intermediaries to open innovation processes.

Retailers face a challenging trade-off in maintaining versus restricting long-established lenient return policies. On the one hand, lenient return policies have become an important part of retailers' value propositions and play a significant role in stimulating consumer purchases. On the other hand, lenient return policies increase the volume of product returns, which hurts profitability. Motivated by observing an increase in restrictive changes to long-established lenient return policies, we investigate consumer reactions to such changes and their managerial implications. Through a series of experiments with diverse consumer samples, we find that restrictive changes, such as shortening return time windows or introducing restocking fees, decrease consumer trust in retailers and lead to lowered purchase, positive word-of-mouth, and loyalty intentions. We also find that providing managerial transparency, in the form of communicating the rationale for restrictive changes, can attenuate the negative consumer reactions to such changes. Moreover, rationales that emphasize the cost of handling returns versus blaming opportunistic and abusive returners are similarly effective. Our findings contribute to the growing academic literature on consumer return policy design and provide actionable insights to retail managers.

Research in healthcare suggests that repeated interaction between a provider and a patient can support better decision-making, resulting in improved efficiencies. To date, these repeated interactions enabling continuity of care have not been studied in hospital inpatient settings. During a hospital stay, decisions related to patient treatment are usually made by two key decision-makers: the attending physician (AP) and the operating physician (OP). Under the single decision-making approach (S-DMA), the AP and OP are the same; in contrast, under the dual decision-making approach (D-DMA), the AP and OP are different. In recent years, there has been an increasing trend toward the use of D-DMA over S-DMA across U.S. hospitals owing to scheduling conflicts. Although research outside healthcare operations management has argued for benefits from both approaches, their impacts on a patient's hospital stay are unclear. In this study, we address this gap by investigating the effects of S-DMA and D-DMA on patient care outcomes in terms of patient length of stay (LOS), treatment cost, and mortality. Data for our study come from the state of Florida and involve 520,554 cardiology patients treated by 9483 APs and 18,398 OPs at 241 hospitals between 2014 and 2016. We account for both patient and physician selection issues when choosing a particular decision-making strategy. Our results suggest that, on average, using S-DMA is associated with reduced patient LOS and treatment cost but has no effect on mortality. We also find that S-DMA is more beneficial for patients with low comorbidity and low process uncertainty, whereas D-DMA is more beneficial for patients with high comorbidity and high process uncertainty. Our results are robust to alternative explanations. We demonstrate that a single decision-maker offers benefits in the context of healthcare delivery, but dual decision-makers may yield benefits when caring for patients with high comorbidity and high process complexity. We discuss the implications of these findings for appropriately deploying S-DMA and D-DMA in inpatient services.

Does the speed of adopting environmental practices impact financial benefits? The strategy literature discusses the contingencies under which firms can gain an early-mover advantage or a late-mover advantage. This research examines the effect of adoption speed on two types of environmental practices: environmental innovation practices (EIP) and environmental management practices (EMP). The results show that early adoption of EIP increases competitive advantage when firms face intense competition. In comparison, we show that early adoption of EMP increases competitive advantage when firms face extremely low competition or have moderate to high levels of slack resources. The study contributes to the literature by revealing the nuances, contingencies, and boundary conditions of when it pays to be green. Prior research shows mixed results when studying firms' decisions to implement environmental practices, which implies that it may not pay to be green. This study shows that firms can get an early mover advantage from environmental practices, but it depends on the type of environmental practices, the firm's internal slack resources, and the firm's external competitive environment.