Zugl.: Berlin, Humboldt-Universiẗat, Diss., 2004.

Commodity trading at both domestic and international levels involves many sources of supply chain risk and uncertainty. Risk management techniques are utilized by industry participants; however, there are unknown risks that can arise throughout the supply chain making effective risk management a difficult task. This study aims to address supply chain risk in soybean exports. A framework is created for a competitive bidding environment in which firms participate in an international import tender. Monte Carlo simulation is used to represent stochastic variables and derive an optimal bid under various scenarios. Sensitivity analysis is then conducted to measure the impact of key input variables on the output values. An alternative specification for risk management is also implemented into the framework. This study provides insight into supply chain uncertainty and incorporates that into a competitive bidding framework for optimal bid derivation and effective risk management.

by Asano Masashi. / Thesis (M.B.A.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1997. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 97-98). / ABSTRACT --- p.ii / TABLE OFCONTENTS --- p.iii / LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS --- p.iv / LIST OF TABLES --- p.v / ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS --- p.vi / Chapter / Chapter I. --- INTRODUCTION --- p.1 / Chapter II. --- METHODOLOGY --- p.7 / Chapter III. --- PROFIT MARGIN ANALYSIS --- p.22 / Chapter IV. --- SENSITIVITY ANALYSIS --- p.39 / Chapter V. --- COST ESTIMATE ANALYSIS --- p.48 / Chapter VI. --- INDUSTRY PROFITABILITY ANALYSIS --- p.76 / Chapter VII. --- CONCLUSION --- p.87 / APPENDIXES --- p.89 / BIBLIOGRAPHY --- p.97

published_or_final_version / Real Estate and Construction / Master / Master of Science in Construction Project Management

Thesis. 1975. M.S.--Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Civil Engineering. / Bibliography: leaves 114-116. / by Elias Nicolas Hani and Yves Lesage. / M.S.

The construction industry is a complex, multi-level system that includes a large collection of independent, heterogeneous organizations and institutions and is associated with several economic sectors and markets. Because of its unique characteristics, the construction industry as one of the major economic sectors and contributors to the economic development of the nation needs its own specific and dedicated economics. The shortcomings of the existing methodologies call for the use of more sophisticated modeling tools that can capture more important aspects of the real world and its complexity in particular the interconnections among elements of the system, their idiosyncrasies, and emergent behavior. As a pioneer attempt in the exploration of a new theory of construction economics, this study aims to found the first building blocks of the comprehensive economic model of the construction industry. In this dissertation, an agent-based approach is applied to model the low-bid lump-sum construction competitive bidding by which most construction works are allocated. This model has several advantages over the previous analytical and empirical models including the capability of observing the bidding process dynamics, the interaction between the heterogeneous and learning agents, and the emergent bidding patterns arising from multiple scenarios of market conditions and contractors’ attributes. Then the model is used as a virtual laboratory for conducting a variety of experiments to answer several important research questions in the field of construction economics. The main research objectives of this study are to: (1) analyze the effectiveness of major quantitative methods in the bidding environment under a variety of market conditions (2) study the effect of contractors’ risk behavior, cost estimating and project management skills, and complexity of projects on contractors’ choice of optimal markup, long-term financial growth and market share (3) investigate the impact of risk behavior and need for work on contractors’ performance. The results presented in this dissertation offer new understandings and insights on the construction bidding environment and recommendations for both owners and contractors’ competitive success, which are not available using conventional approaches. In particular, results suggest that (1) using Friedman model can result in considerably higher market share whereas using Gates model can result in higher profit per project, (2) the optimal policy for contractors is moderation in both dimensions of risk attitude and need for work, (3) the comparative performance of slightly and extremely risk averse contractors are depending on level of cost estimating accuracy and project execution skills of contractors as well as the level of project complexities.

This research evaluates the change observed during the implementation of an outsourced application development within a large defence organisation in Europe. Whereas most extant research focuses on the firm level or dyadic relations this research aims to uncover how different outcomes can be explained by attending to the micro-processes and specific mechanisms of work between purposive actors as they create the new service. The research was a longitudinal, six-year in-depth participant observation focused on the implementation of an HRM application carried out by six case organisations within a consortium formed to implement the service. The results of the field study are based on a grounded analysis from semi-structured interviews, focus groups, documents, and over 5,000 email communications involving a total of 62 stakeholders. A conceptual framework of neo-institutional theory, practice and power was used to analyse the process of change as the consortium worked together to deliver the outsourcing. The findings showed that political goals and behaviour influenced and shaped the outsourcing implementation and exposed the systemic nature of conflict within a constrained project context. The high conflict observed was shown to negatively influence success and supports the notion that strong contracting is only effective in stable contexts. It was also shown that tight control can negatively impact collaboration, by reducing adaptability, forcing vendors to take an inflexible posture. This type of behaviour was observed to increase power and conflict within the project and buyers reacted by increasing control and applying sanctions. This resulting in increased conflict and was a form of feedback loop. The findings also showed control in general is ineffective and can be overwhelmed in situations where there is high demand uncertainty. These observations add to the outsourcing and power/political literature by showing the central role of power and conflict and suggests the final configuration of an outsourcing is a negotiated order that may be at variance to the original objectives. Implications for practice: From a practical perspective, managers should think carefully before rushing into tight preventative contracts and consider the complexity of the demanded service and degree of completeness in their requirements. High uncertainty can lead to outsourcing failure, conflict within the implementation, and unmet expectations, unless specific mechanisms are in place to mitigate this. Furthermore, embedding new work processes and procedures to manage the service within the buying organisation is fundamental to how outsourcing actually works. Buyers and suppliers must pay attention to the design and implementation of processes and routines to manage effective delivery of the outsourced service.

While there is an ever increasing adoption of e-sourcing, where a buyer auctions off procurement contracts to a small group of pre-qualified suppliers, there is a lack of understanding of the impact of dynamic bidding process on procurement outcomes and bidding behavior. To extend the knowledge of this important issue, in this thesis, we explore empirically the value of online procurement auction on cost reduction, quality management, and winner selection from the buyer's perspective. We also explore how incumbent status affects the procurement outcomes. From suppliers' perspective, we characterize their bidding behavior and examine the effect of incumbent status on bidding. First, we collect detailed auction and contract awarding data for manufacturing goods during 2002-2004 from a large buyer in the high-tech industry. The rich data set enables us to apply statistical model based cluster technique to uncover heterogeneous bidding behavior of industry participants. The distribution of the bidding patterns varies between incumbent and non-incumbent suppliers. We also find that the buyer bias towards the incumbent suppliers by awarding them procurement contracts more often and with a price premium. Next, focusing on recurring auctions, we find that suppliers bid adaptively. The adaptive bidding is affected by the rank of suppliers' final bids. Finally, with field data of procurement auction for legal services, we demonstrate that service prices are on average reduced after dynamic bidding events. Most interestingly, the cost savings are achieved without the sacrifice of quality. Incumbent winners' quality is higher, on average, than the quality of buyer's supplier base before the auctions, while non-incumbent winner's quality is lower. These findings imply that the main value of online procurement auctions for business services comes from incumbents in the form of reduced price and enhanced quality. We find that after adjusting for incumbents' higher quality, incumbent bias disappears. Our results also imply that the buyer might possess important information about the incumbents, through past experiences, that cannot be easily included in the buyer's scoring function due to uncodifiability.

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Real Estate and Construction / Master / Master of Science in Construction Project Management

Universiẗat, Diss., 2006--Frankfurt (Main).