Essays on vulnerability of global supply chains
Abstract
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Essays on vulnerability of global supply chains
- Creators
- Jafar Namdar
- Contributors
- Jennifer Blackhurst (Advisor)Gautam Pant (Advisor)Kang Zhao (Committee Member)Sachin Modi (Committee Member)
- Resource Type
- Dissertation
- Degree Awarded
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), University of Iowa
- Degree in
- Business Administration
- Date degree season
- Summer 2022
- DOI
- 10.25820/etd.006464
- Publisher
- University of Iowa
- Number of pages
- xi, 224 pages
- Copyright
- Copyright 2022 Jafar Namdar
- Language
- English
- Description illustrations
- illustrations (some color)
- Description bibliographic
- Includes bibliographical references (pages 195-224).
- Public Abstract (ETD)
A supply chain network includes a focal firm, which brings an identifiable product to the consumer market and its suppliers, which are spread across multiple tiers of the network. The suppliers, focal firms, and customers serve as nodes of the supply chain network. Within the supply chain network, disruptions can happen to cause an element of the supply chain to stop functioning, thus affecting the continuity of product flow. Disruptions like natural disasters (e.g., earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, pandemics like COVID 19) or man-made disasters highlight the importance of managing disruptions in the supply chain network. In the first chapter, we prescribe resilience or mitigation strategies that are most effective against different disruptions. We show various disruptions require different resilience strategies meaning there is no silver bullet strategy to deal with all disruptions. Also, combining resilience strategies is not always beneficial and can occasionally have detrimental effects.
In the second chapter, we propose a new predictive model that identifies the weakest node or supplier, aka the nexus supplier of the supply chain network. In fact, the nexus suppliers might cause huge cascade disruptions mainly due to their unique position in the supply network. The predictive model is evaluated on various real-world supply networks with thousands of nodes, and the model's performance is promising, with at least 90% accuracy in identifying nexus suppliers.
In the final chapter, we develop new measures to operationalize the industrial and geographical concentrations of firms' upstream industries. We show that competitive industries with ample suppliers may still impose significant risks on downstream firms if the industries are concentrated mainly in a few nations or small geographical areas. We document that the firms whose upstream suppliers are operating in highly concentrated industries on average experience 250 million US dollars reductions in sales.
- Academic Unit
- Tippie College of Business
- Record Identifier
- 9984285248802771