ESSAYS ON DECEPTIVE COUNTERFEITS IN SUPPLY CHAINS: A BEHAVORIAL PERSPECTIVE

This dissertation is comprised of three essays intended to contribute to the operations management discipline, specifically within supply chain management. The first essay provides a research agenda for studying deceptive product counterfeits, which are products that have been manufactured and/or distributed and sold by an entity in violation of another’s intellectual property rights and intentionally misrepresented by the seller as the genuine article. The proliferation of counterfeits into legitimate supply chains presents quality, health and safety and cost concerns for nearly all industries. We identify antecedents of vulnerability to deceptive counterfeits for firms and their supply chain partners using Situational Crime Prevention Theory and Normal Accident Theory. Vulnerability to counterfeiting has negative performance impacts for the firm, its customers and society. We propose using the Six Ts of Supply Chain Quality Management (Roth, Tsay, Pullman and Gray, 2008) as an approach to select effective strategies to mitigate these impacts. Essay Two serves as an initial effort to understand how counterfeits can enter supply chains. In this essay, we test whether purchasing specialists can serve as effective guardians of the supply chain using a scenario based role playing experiment. We explore if buyers can detect signals of counterfeits in proposals and successfully avoid the counterfeit supplier in the decision process. We additionally examine whether time constraints and workload pressure detracts from the ability to successfully process signals and avoid the counterfeit. We find that the buyers can successfully detect counterfeit signals and avoid the counterfeit in the selection decision, but don’t find support for time constraints and workload pressure effects. The final contribution of this dissertation is a methodological essay that explores the effect of time pressure on decision making by using a combination of perceived time pressure and objective measures of time spent in the decision process to determine if time pressure affects the quality of the decision making in a supplier selection decision. We find that time constraints and perceived time pressure are related constructs that negatively affect decision quality in a supplier selection decision.