Quality investment, inspection policy, and pricing decisions in a decentralized supply chain
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper studies the interaction between two key quality management decisions—input conformance quality and inspection policy—and related wholesale and retail prices in a two echelon supply chain. Market demand depends on the retail price as well as the end‐product conformance quality, which itself depends on the input quality and the inspection scheme. Consistent with previous empirical findings in the literature, we show that an increase in quality does not always result in higher prices for consumers due to the cost‐lowering effect of better quality. We also show that a lower input quality may still result in higher end‐product quality because of how it might incentivize more and/or better inspection. Any interaction between input quality and inspection policy becomes more pronounced in the decentralized system due to incentive asymmetry between the channel partners. This makes the adoption of a full‐inspection policy more likely there compared to an integrated system. Indeed, while vertical competition due to decentralization results in higher prices for customers, it can also result in better quality of end products. Another interesting finding in the decentralized setting is that, somewhat counterintuitively, a player may indeed opt to bear a higher share of the penalty for defective products sold to consumers resulting in higher profits for the player.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it