Law, regulation, and private standards have evolved to enhance sustainability in value chains. However, the volume of hard and soft laws has created complexity and fragmentation for consumers and firms. In addition, global value chains are increasingly disaggregated, making it difficult for consumers to enforce breaches of sustainability representations. Blockchain, as an immutable and digital record keeping system, is a tool that can deal with this growing complexity in global value chains. Documents verifying sustainability that were once in the private domain and stored in paper copy can now be made accessible in a secure and transparent blockchain platform. Despite a growing interest in the potential of blockchain to transform businesses, there are few concrete examples or scholarly literature showing how blockchain is operationalized in practice. Using a “conceptual framework analysis” approach, we develop an Evidence, Verifiability, and Enforceability (EVE) framework to illustrate how blockchain can enhance sustainability by providing information to consumers on the origin of products, assurances as to the veracity of the information, and a mechanism to enforce representations through the blockchain smart contract function. However, there need to be safeguards put in place for blockchain technology to meet its promise and we discuss some of these challenges.

When a supplier fails to comply with social and environmental standards, the buyer’s reputation suffers. Reputation costs can typically be very high for the buyer, whereas the supplier’s liability is often limited. Conventional procurement strategies such as dual sourcing mitigate the buyer’s operational risk, but they often do so at the expense of increasing its reputation risk and sourcing costs. In this paper, we propose a risk-sharing contract for managing the buyer’s reputation concerns. We find that by sharing some of the supplier’s operational loss, the buyer may (in some conditions) decrease its reputational risk, but this has to be balanced against an increase in the operational risk. Risk sharing also reduces sourcing costs because the buyer takes on some of the worst-case loss of a wealth-constrained supplier. These results suggest that risk sharing can be superior, as a procurement strategy, to conventional approaches such as dual sourcing or penalty contracts. This is true when reputation and sourcing costs are a significant concern and operational costs are not that high. Under some conditions, the buyer may choose risk sharing even if it increases reputation risk in order to reduce procurement costs. This paper was accepted by Victor Martínez-de-Albéniz, operations management.

Sample Average Approximation in Data-Driven Newsvendor In the data-driven newsvendor problem, the manager makes sequential inventory decisions while learning the unknown demand distribution based on past demand samples. How does the widely used sample average approximation approach perform in this problem? In “Technical Note—Data-Driven Newsvendor Problem: Performance of the Sample Average Approximation,” Lin, Huh, Krishnan, and Uichanco analyze the performance of the sample average approximation as the time horizon grows, which turns out to be the best possible. The authors also examine how the local flatness of the demand distribution around the optimal order quantity affects the complexity of the problem. They show that the sample average approximation has the best achievable performance in terms of not only the time horizon, but also the local flatness of the demand distribution.

Why do supply chain contracts take the forms that they do? Which contracts should firms adopt to coordinate incentives along a supply chain? This monograph synthesizes the theory of contracts along supply chains. It integrates developments from two largely separate literatures, the management science literature on supply chain coordination and the economic literature on vertical control.