Accuracy of Demand Forecasts in a Supply Chain: the Supplier’s Suspicion about the Buyer’s Opportunistic Behavior

要約

This study sheds light on the dark side of e-procurement systems. One of the challenging issues presented by inter-organizational systems is data accuracy, and we explore the possibility for opportunistic behavior that causes data inaccuracy. We focus on buyers’ demand forecasts among several types of shared information. Although several sophisticated forecasting methods have led to better forecasting, forecast accuracy still remains a major challenge for most companies. Besides the forecasting methods, buyers’ data manipulation may result in inaccuracy of the demand forecasts. Thus, we investigate the factors that are related to buyers’ intentional overstatement of their demand forecasts from three different perspectives of products, relationships, and data. Since it is difficult to obtain honest answers from the buyers about whether they intentionally inflate their demand forecasts or not, we use the suppliers’ opinions as the proxy for buyers’ opinions. Hence, we study factors that cause suppliers to doubt buyers’ demand forecasts. We conducted a questionnaire survey of raw material or component suppliers in the electrical and electronics industry of Southeast Asia, and analyzed the data using PLS (partial least squares) models. To the best of our knowledge, no empirical research on data manipulation in information sharing has been hitherto conducted from the perspective of buyer-supplier relationships.

Keywords:
Opportunism, information sharing, supply chain management, e-procurement, and buyer-supplier relationships