Improving a supplier's social responsibility: the effect of competition and incomplete visibility

Amirmohsen Golmohammadi, Majid Taghavi, Samira Farivar and Ali Vaezi

International Journal of Production Research, 2025, vol. 63, issue 15, 5582-5601

Abstract: Firms face increasing pressure from consumers, governments, and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to implement better social responsibility (SR) practices in their supply chains. However, a lack of visibility into suppliers' operations and competition can hinder a firm's efforts to improve SR in its supply chain. In this study, we consider two competing supply chains, each consisting of a single firm and a single supplier, and explore the case where the firms can invest in their suppliers' SR capabilities. We assume the firms do not have full visibility into the suppliers' SR practices. Moreover, the suppliers are under scrutiny from a third party that may disclose the suppliers' compliance levels to consumers. Our results show that increasing the intensity of price competition leads firms to invest more in their suppliers and improves suppliers' SR. We further show that a firm benefits from having full visibility into its supplier's SR practices only when the suppliers' unit investment costs are low. We extend our results to consider the case where consumers respond to the supplier's actual compliance level (rather than just the news of their noncompliance) and demonstrate the robustness of our findings.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00207543.2025.2456597 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:tprsxx:v:63:y:2025:i:15:p:5582-5601

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/TPRS20

DOI: 10.1080/00207543.2025.2456597

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Production Research is currently edited by Professor A. Dolgui

More articles in International Journal of Production Research from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().