Terence A. Oliva

The Role of the Internet in Supply Chain Management

Abstract The Internet has grown rapidly over the last 5 years. It is predicted that more than 100 million households will be connected to the World Wide Web by 2002. But what about the use of the Internet in business-to-business supply chain applications? Here, the greatest potential of the Internet is being realized by speeding up communication between customers and their suppliers, improving service levels, and reducing logistics costs. In this article, the authors discuss for the first time how the Internet is being used in managing the major components of supply chains including transportation, purchasing, inventory management, customer service, production scheduling, warehousing, and vendor relations. The study breaks down each area and describes to what extent and how the Internet is being applied. The study also looks at the development of Intranets and Extranets in supply chains.

The organizational adoption of high-technology products “for use”: Effects of size, preferences, and radicalness of impact

Abstract This research reports the results of a study on organizational adoption of high-technology products “for use” in contrast to “for manufacture.” Additionally, the study examines high-technology adoptions which often have different issues that are important to the decision process relative when compared to the adoption of less-technical products. For example, the level of compatibility or the availability of complementary products (e.g., network externality considerations) are often important issues for high-technology adoptions. As such, this study provides additional information in the relatively underresearched organizational adoption literature, particularly as it relates to high-technology products. In order to maintain connectivity with past work, we look at the firm size versus adoption issue. At the same time, we add new information by also examining how organizational preferences for products, and the degree of radicalness of the products affect organizational adoption. We use a proportional-hazards model to test our hypotheses using panel data on 400 firms that are drawn from 14 industries. As part of the research effort we developed an improved scale for judging the radicalness of a product than has been used in prior research. Furthermore, we extended the Booz, Allen, & Hamilton New Product Categories (1982) approach to incorporate innovation impact. As expected, the results show that size “does matter,” but that it is modified by degree of product radicalness and organizational preference. Interestingly, we found that for high-technology products “for use,” organizations prefer radical impact products but adopt incremental impact products. Hence, preferences and purchase behaviors do not match.

Technological choice under conditions of changing network externality

Abstract This paper integrates work from the catastrophe theory literature (Baack & Cullen, 1992; Herbig, 1991; and Oliva, 1991) and economics literature (Farrell & Saloner, 1985) that collectively looks at various issues relating to the firms adoption of a technology. The value added is that by marrying the economics approach to catastrophe theory, the resulting model can describe adoption under different degrees of network externalities. This means the model can capture technology adoption throughout the product life-cycle in the end user market. Furthermore, the model relaxes the assumption of most economic models and allows firms to switch back to the old technology or standard. This aspect of the model can capture what is currently happening with firm responses to environmental concerns. For example, McDonalds preference for containers has gone from paper technology to plastics technology and now its back to paper technology. Suppliers have had to switch or be switched.

Multivariate Catastrophe Model Estimation: Method and Application

Leading management scholars have called for the use of nonstandard research to help solve complex problems that are not tractable with standard approaches. This article demonstrates the use of mult...

Technological Choice and Network Externalities: A Catastrophe Model Analysis of Firm Software Adoption for Competing Operating Systems

This paper presents an empirical estimation of catastrophe model of organizational adoptions of a high technology product when network externalities are present. As such, it integrates work from the economics literature and the catastrophe literature to provide a broadeer look at adoption issues. Additionally, it is one of the few empirical studies we are aware of that attempts to model organizational adoption of high-technology products for use rather than for manufacture.

Effectiveness of Brand‐related 15‐second Commercials

While 15‐second commercials appeared to have peaked at 40 percent in terms of network usage in the US, it appears that the commercial format is here to stay. A recent development has been the use of “book‐end” configurations of such commercials, where the 15‐second commercials are separated by other advertising. Looks at a variation of this approach where self‐contained but related 15‐second commercials are used in a single one‐minute pod. Results show that pod configuration matters in terms of copy point recall for the 15‐second commercial. In short, pod configuration matters when using 15‐second related and unrelated commercials in conjunction with other longer commercials.