THE IMPACT OF MULTI-TIER SUPPLY CHAIN COMPLEXITY AND NETWORK CENTRALITY ON BUYING FIRMS’ PERFORMANCE
Date of Award
2024
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy in Business Administration
Specialization
Operations and Supply Chain Management
Department
Business Administration
First Advisor
Koray Özpolat
Second Advisor
Seung Kyoon Shin
Abstract
Firms establish business relationships and exchange products and services in multi-tier supply chains. Lower-tier suppliers provide parts, components, and services to buying firms through tier-1 suppliers in the multi-tier supply network. The complexity and network characteristics of those lower-tier suppliers could impact buying firm’ performance. These firms are more likely to be driven by the supply-side economics to pursue innovativeness and support in the information and communication technology (ICT) industry, due to the shift from physical processes to information and resource-based integration across the entire supply chains. Despite the potential, it is challenging for buying firms to identify and manage lower-tier suppliers. Utilizing multiple data analysis approaches, this dissertation investigates complexity, innovativeness, and network centrality from a multi-tier supply chain perspective, and how they affect buying firms’ performance based on two essays.
The first essay empirically examines the association between the complexity of supply chain network, the innovativeness of supply base, and the ICT buying firms’ sales growth and operational performance. Utilizing archival data from the financial databases, I find that tier-2 suppliers’ innovativeness positively affects buying firms’ sales growth and operational performance. Horizontal complexity of the supply base produces positive effects on buying firms’ sales growth but negative effects on operational performance. Interestingly, spatial complexity generates effects. Vertical complexity reveals negative effects on buying firms’ operational performance. Sample selection bias and two-stage least squares (2SLS) are included as the robustness check and show consistent findings.
The second essay investigates the relationship between network centrality, degree, betweenness, and closeness centrality of tier-1 suppliers and buying firms’ performance in the entire multi-tier supply chains. Relying on a panel data set from multiple financial databases covering eight years, I investigate how such centrality metrics operate on buying firms’ financial performance. The findings show that tier-1 suppliers’ betweenness centrality negatively affects buying firms’ financial performance when treating the year as the fixed effect. Such negative effects also exist, when either considering the type of buying firms’ industry as the random effects or including the year and industry as the mixed cross-random effects. We receive consistent findings after implementing hot deck and k-nearest neighbor (KNN) imputations for missing variables. Our investigation also confirms the literature that buying firms’ degree and betweenness centrality are associated with their own financial performance.
Recommended Citation
Liu, Li, "THE IMPACT OF MULTI-TIER SUPPLY CHAIN COMPLEXITY AND NETWORK CENTRALITY ON BUYING FIRMS’ PERFORMANCE" (2024). Open Access Dissertations. Paper 1637.
https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/oa_diss/1637