Seeking survivals under COVID-19: The WhatsApp platform's shopping service operations

How COVID-19 pandemic has shaped buyer-supplier relationships in engineering companies with ethical perception considerations: A multi-methodological study

In business-to-business (B2B) operations, prior studies have mainly explored transaction-based relationships with both buyers and suppliers opportunistic behaviors, driven largely by their intent to maximize their own benefits. These studies have also found that dependency on partners increases when supply materials are scarce. However, research is scant on how this relationship changes in the face of exogenous forces such as the COVID-19 pandemic, keeping in mind the ethical perception considerations. This study aims to bridge this gap in the literature by studying how buyers and sellers leverage collaboration and resource-sharing to tide over pandemic-like situations similar to the current COVID-19 pandemic while considering their ethical perceptions. We conduct a multi-methodological study consisting of an industrial survey and an interview-based thematic analysis. In the first phase, we collect primary data using a structured questionnaire and conduct a covariance-based structural equation modeling (CB-SEM) analysis. In the second phase, we conduct a post-hoc test. We find that non-regular suppliers will share strategic resources with buyers during uncertain times (e.g. COVID-19 pandemic) if they have a high ethical perception of the buying firm and share a candid relationship despite being their irregular customers. Our findings propose that B2B firms should maintain healthy relationships with alternative suppliers to build trust and avoid supply crises in times of disruptions.

Advancing supply chain management from agility to hyperagility: a dynamic capability view

Research and practice emphasize the criticality of supply chain agility in responding to external disruptions. However, many organizations struggled to respond at enhanced speed to the global supply chain shocks caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Organizations need hyperagile supply chains to survive and remain competitive in an environment characterized by unexpected and sudden disruptions such as the COVID-19 pandemic. We propose that supply chain hyperagility (SCH) is a distinctive organization-specific capability. It enables organizations to effectively manage demand shocks at extreme speeds and under extreme time pressures. We advance the concept of supply chain hyperagility and establish its antecedents, taking the dynamic capability perspective. This study operationalizes the SCH construct for the first time and investigates its antecedents using structural equation modeling. The results highlight the significance of data analytical capabilities, market orientation, entrepreneurial orientation, and supply chain integration in shaping supply chain hyperagility. The study offers practical insights for managers regarding designing supply chains that can navigate hyperagile environments and benefit from the opportunities presented by such environments.

Adaptive R&D contract for urgently needed drugs: Lessons from COVID-19 vaccine development

This paper analyzes an incentive contract for new vaccine research and development (R&D) under pandemic situations such as COVID-19, considering the R&D contract's adaptability to the pandemic. We study how the public sector (government) designs the adaptive R&D contract and offers it to pharmaceutical enterprises. An agency-theoretic model is employed to explore the contract whose terms are an upfront grant as a fixed fee and a sales tax credit as an incentive tool, examining how the values of related parameters affect contract term determinations. We found that the adaptability factor derived from urgent policies such as emergency use authorization (EUA) as well as tax credits, can be utilized as practical incentive tools that lead vaccine developers to increase their effort levels for R&D success. We also found that public-private state-emergency contracts may not follow the conventional wisdom. Counterintuitively, dependency on tax credits (incentive part) decrease as the client's degree of risk averseness increases in the emergency contract.

Mining voices from self-expressed messages on social-media: Diagnostics of mental distress during COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a severe impact on mankind, causing physical suffering and deaths across the globe. Even those who have not contracted the virus have experienced its far-reaching impacts, particularly on their mental health. The increased incidences of psychological problems, anxiety associated with the infection, social restrictions, economic downturn, etc., are likely to aggravate with the virus spread and leave a longer impact on humankind. These reasons in aggregation have raised concerns on mental health and created a need to identify novel precursors of depression and suicidal tendencies during COVID-19. Identifying factors affecting mental health and causing suicidal ideation is of paramount importance for timely intervention and suicide prevention. This study, thus, bridges this gap by utilizing computational intelligence and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to unveil the factors underlying mental health issues. We observed that the pandemic and subsequent lockdown anxiety emerged as significant factors leading to poor mental health outcomes after the onset of COVID-19. Consistent with previous works, we found that psychological disorders have remained pre-eminent. Interestingly, financial burden was found to cause suicidal ideation before the pandemic, while it led to higher odds of depressive (non-suicidal) thoughts for individuals who lost their jobs. This study offers significant implications for health policy makers, governments, psychiatric practitioners, and psychologists.

Examining collaborative buyer-supplier relationships and social sustainability in the "new normal" era: the moderating effects of justice and big data analytical intelligence

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in a slew of new business practices that have put the society and environment under strain. This has drawn the attention of supply chain researchers working to address the COVID-19 pandemic's looming social sustainability issues. Prior literature has indicated that collaborative relationships improve organizational performance. Over the past years, problems related to justice are reported (e.g., between Walmart Canada and the Lego group), which might negatively affect the buyer-supplier relationship. In the new normal, the effect of justice on collaborative buyer-supplier relationships on social sustainability in the COVID-19 context is obviously essential but under-explored. The current study examines buyer-supplier collaborative relationships' influence on social sustainability under the moderating effect of justice and big data analytical intelligence. In this paper, we employ the stakeholder resource-based view, loose coupling theory, and resource dependency theory as the theoretical lens to establish the research hypotheses. Using primary survey data collected from supply chain practitioners in South Africa, hypothesis testing is done using a covariance-based structural equation modelling technique. To enhance research rigor, we have checked the dyadic perspectives of both buyers and suppliers. Our empirical results reveal that collaborative buyer-supplier relationships positively influence supplier social sustainability in the new normal era. However, it is relatively stronger from the suppliers' perspective when compared with the buyers' perspective. Secondly, the moderating effect of perceptions of organizational justice and big data analytical intelligence on the relationship between collaborative buyer-supplier relationships and supplier social sustainability is also statistically significant. However, it is relatively stronger from the buyers' perspective when compared with the suppliers' perspective. These are major findings of this study. Theoretical and managerial implications are further discussed.