Skip to Main Content
 

Global Search Box

 
 
 

ETD Abstract Container

Abstract Header

Three Essays on Sourcing Decisions

Osborn, Beverly
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9209-9145
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1669929700164705

Abstract Details

2022, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Business Administration.
This dissertation addresses the relative importance of price and non-price criteria in sourcing decisions from three distinct perspectives. Each essay is motivated by the same problem: that organizations tend to unintentionally overweight cost minimization objectives in their sourcing decisions. In the first of three essays, I show that excessively price-based decision-making is a widespread problem in sourcing. To do this, I combined two sources of data on contract awards by the US federal government. I applied coarsened exact matching to identify cases where contracts were awarded using different criteria in similar situations. I then used logistic regression to show that when non-price criteria are weighted more heavily, the same contractor is more likely to receive awards for similar work in the future. This relationship is absent when there is a requirement for the decision-maker to provide written justification for the use of the more price-based approach, allowing me to infer a solution to the problem identified. In the second essay, I investigate whether the procurement profession’s identity influences the relative importance of price in supplier selection decisions. I first conducted a series of semi-structured interviews with current practitioners, eliciting their comments on: their level of identification with the procurement profession; procurement’s group image; others’ perceptions of procurement’s group image; and, procurement’s status within their organization. Drawing from the observed variation in responses, I designed and conducted a scenario-based experiment. I find that strong identification with the procurement profession can contribute to more price-based sourcing decisions. In the third essay, I expand my focus from procurement professionals to a broader set of professions that commonly contribute to sourcing decisions: supply management, engineering, and marketing. Seeking to understand how these different perspectives influence sourcing decisions, I gathered text corpora from each discipline (specifically, from practitioner-targeted magazines published by leading professional associations). I then used the word2vec algorithm to train independent semantic space models. I interpret differences between these models as differences in perspectives between these professions and I demonstrate an application of the technique by using it to identify points of similarity and divergence between the professions’ competitive priorities. I conclude by summarizing the implications of these three essays for theory and practice and highlighting opportunities for future related research.
John Gray (Advisor)
James Hill (Advisor)
Christian Blanco (Committee Member)
117 p.
Business Administration; Management; Operations Research
purchasing; sourcing; procurement; empirical; operations; supply chain management; public procurement; social identity; econometrics; behavioral experiment; text analysis; word2vec; cross-functional decision-making

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Osborn, B. (2022). Three Essays on Sourcing Decisions [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1669929700164705

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Osborn, Beverly. Three Essays on Sourcing Decisions. 2022. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1669929700164705.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Osborn, Beverly. "Three Essays on Sourcing Decisions." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2022. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1669929700164705

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1669929700164705
211
© 2022, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.