Performance Analysis of Order Fulfillment for Low Demand Items in E-tailing

We study inventory allocation and order fulfillment policies among warehouses for low-demand SKUs at an online retailer. A large e-tailer strategically stocks inventory for SKUs with low demand. The motivations are to provide a wide range of selections and faster customer fulfillment service. We assume the e-tailer has the technological capability to manage and control the inventory globally: all warehouses act as one to serve the global demand simultaneously. The e-tailer will utilize its entire inventory, regardless of location, to serve demand. Thus, given the global demand and an order fulfillment policy, there are trade-offs involving inventory holding costs, transshipment costs, and backordering costs in determining the optimal system inventory level and allocation of inventory to warehouses. For the case of Poisson demand and constant lead time, we develop methods to approximate the key system performance metrics like transshipment, backorders and average system inventory. We then use these results to develop guidelines for inventory stocking and order fulfillment policies for online retailers.Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA

Does Board Independence Reduce the Cost of Debt?

Using the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the associated change in listing standards as a natural experiment, we find that while board independence decreases the cost of debt when credit conditions are strong or leverage low, it increases the cost of debt when credit conditions are poor or leverage high. We also document that independent directors set corporate policies that increase firm risk. These results suggest that, acting in the interest of shareholders, independent directors are increasingly costly to bondholders with the intensification of the agency conflict between these two stakeholders

Gender premium and economic downswings

© 2017 Elsevier B.V. Using data of 2140 US firms over the period of 1998–2012, we investigate if gender–compensation relationship exists in executives’ compensation and bonus plans of the US firms; and whether this compensation difference is more visible during economic downswings. We find that not only the gender premium exists for male CEOs in executives’ compensation plans of the US companies but also the male executive bonuses are more sensitive to market downturns compared to their female counterparts. On average, female executives get a gender disadvantage in the form of lower total compensation and bonuses compared to their male counterparts, which persists even during adverse economic conditions. Finally, contrary to our initial expectations, we find male and female CEOs are equally likely to be laid-off, even during market recessions, despite female CEOs being claimed better manager by the mainstream literature

Zombie board: Board tenure and firm performance

Singapore Management University SOA

International Evidence on the Determinants of Organizational Ethical Vulnerability

© 2018 British Academy of Management This paper proposes a model to explain what makes organizations ethically vulnerable. Drawing upon legitimacy, institutional, agency and individual moral reasoning theories we consider three sets of explanatory factors and examine their association with organizational ethical vulnerability. The three sets comprise external institutional context, internal corporate governance mechanisms and organizational ethical infrastructure. We combine these three sets of factors and develop an analytical framework for classifying ethical issues and propose a new model of organizational ethical vulnerability. We test our model on a sample of 253 firms that were involved in ethical misconduct and compare them with a matched sample of the same number of firms from 28 different countries. The results suggest that weak regulatory environment and internal corporate governance, combined with profitability warnings or losses in the preceding year, increase organizational ethical vulnerability. We find counterintuitive evidence suggesting that firms’ involvement in bribery and corruption prevention training programmes is positively associated with the likelihood of ethical vulnerability. By synthesizing insights about individual and corporate behaviour from multiple theories, this study extends existing analytical literature on business ethics. Our findings have implications for firms’ external regulatory settings, corporate governance mechanisms and organizational ethical infrastructure