Charles J Corbett

University of California, Los Angeles | UCLA · Anderson School of Management

As firms become progressively more tightly coupled in global supply chains, rather than being large vertically integrated monoliths, risks and opportunities associated with activities, upstream or downstream, will increasingly impinge upon their own well-being. For a firm to thrive, it is increasingly imperative that it be aware of economic, enviro...

This chapter discusses several important aspects related to supply chain carbon footprinting. It presents the main motivations for carbon footprinting and describes how carbon footprints can be measured. It introduces different carbon accounting methods, ranging from direct measurement-based to extrapolation-based ones. It also provides an example...

This paper is motivated by the challenges faced by clinics in sub‐Saharan Africa in allocating scarce and unreliable supply of antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) among a large pool of eligible patients. Existing discussion of ARV allocation is focused on qualitative rules for prioritizing certain socioeconomic and demographic patient segments over others...

Firms around the world need to find ways to continuously reduce their carbon footprint, preferably in ways that are profitable or cost-effective. The opportunities available to them will change over time, as they implement the most profitable ones first and as technology changes. When designing and adjusting their carbon policies, policy-makers nee...

Numerous technologies are emerging to reduce water use and pollution in China's textile industry, including several that are promoted by the China National Textile and Apparel Council as cleaner technologies in their five-year development guideline published in 2016. Though these technologies appear promising, the complexity of the industry makes i...

Low‐probability, high‐impact events are difficult to manage. Firms may underinvest in risk assessments for low‐probability, high‐impact events because it is not easy to link the direct and indirect benefits of doing so. Scholarly research on the effectiveness of programs aimed at reducing such events faces the same challenge. In this article, we dr...

The rapid growth of “big data” provides tremendous opportunities for making better decisions, where “better” can be defined using any combination of economic, environmental, or social metrics. This essay provides a few examples of how the use of big data can precipitate more sustainable decision making. However, as with any technology, the use of b...

Part of the underlying vision of CDP (formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project) is to enhance firms’ climate change strategies by encouraging them to measure their emissions and corresponding risks and opportunities. Drawing on interviews with 38 firms in seven countries that disclose to CDP, we found that the benefits firms experience from the measu...

Within industrial ecology, there is a substantial community focusing on life cycle assessment (LCA) and corresponding tools and methods. Within the field of supply chain management, an increasing community is converging around sustainable supply chains. These two communities study the same underlying systems, but bring different perspectives to bea...

This chapter presents an overview of the methods and challenges behind carbon footprinting at the supply chain level. We start by providing some information about the scientific background on climate change. This information is necessary to clarify the overall methodology behind carbon footprinting measurement. We also briefly review the main motiv...

As firms become progressively more tightly coupled in global supply chains, rather than being large vertically integrated monoliths, risks and opportunities associated with activities upstream or downstream, will increasingly impinge upon their own wellbeing. For a firm to thrive, it is increasingly imperative that it be aware of economic, environm...

Purpose The increased focus on sustainability has led firms to incorporate a range of sustainability practices in their products, processes and supply chains. Because these practices are typically difficult to observe, firms often seek an independent verification and adopt voluntary environmental and social standards and eco-labels such as ISO 1400...

Background: Decision analysis-a systematic approach to solving complex problems-offers tools and frameworks to support decision making that are increasingly being applied to environmental challenges. Alternatives analysis is a method used in regulation and product design to identify, compare, and evaluate the safety and viability of potential subs...

For many early-stage entrepreneurs, hiring the first employee is a critical step in the firm's growth. Doing so often requires significant time and monetary investments. To understand the trade-offs involved in deciding when to hire the first employee and how hiring differs in entrepreneurial settings from more established firm settings, we present...

Although collaboration and performance measurement are widely recognized as critical for increasing sustainability in supply chains, little is known about how comprehensively firms are currently measuring their supply chain carbon emissions (or Scope 3). We develop a way to assess how complete firms' reports of Scope 3 emissions are, by comparing t...

For many entrepreneurs, time is a key constraint. They need to invest time to achieve growth, but also lose time because of recurring crises. We develop a simple stochastic dynamic program to model how an entrepreneur should prioritize between improving processes to reduce crises versus harvesting revenue or ensuring future growth. We show that it...

For many entrepreneurs, time is a key constraint. They need to invest time to achieve growth, but also lose time because of recurring crises. We develop a simple stochastic dynamic program to model how an entrepreneur should prioritize between improving processes to reduce crises versus harvesting revenue or ensuring future growth. We show that it...

“Eco-labels” are an increasingly important form of private regulation for sustainability in areas such as carbon emissions, water consumption, ethical sourcing, or organic produce. The growing interest and popularity of eco-labels has also been coupled with growing concerns about their credibility, in part because the standard-setting and conformit...

Management systems standards have become ubiquitous, adopted by millions of organizations around the world. The ISO 9000 and ISO 14000 quality and environmental management systems standards are the most well-known, but standards exist or are emerging for many other aspects of management too. Such a widespread phenomenon invites many questions. Key...

The literature on the ISO standards is multidisciplinary and scattered around a broad collection of journals, making it near-impossible to get an overview of what we do and do not know about Management Systems Standards. This monograph fills that gap by providing an integrated perspective on the entire body of academic literature related to ISO 900...

Carbon footprinting is a tool for firms to determine the total greenhouse gas GHG emissions associated with their supply chain or with a unit of final product or service. Carbon footprinting typically aims to identify where best to invest in emission reduction efforts, and/or to determine the proportion of total emissions that an individual firm is...

In many manufacturing operations, profitable energy efficiency opportunities remain unexploited. Although previous studies have tried to explain the underinvestment, we focus on how the way in which a portfolio of opportunities is presented in a list affects adoption decisions. We use information on over 100,000 energy-saving recommendations made t...

Entrepreneurs need to invest money and time to grow their firms. Both money and time are often scarce, but the nature of these two resources is fundamentally different. Considering a small, fast-growing entrepreneurial firm, we show that the firm's key bottleneck resource shifts from money to time as the firm grows, and we characterize hiring as an...

For many growth-oriented entrepreneurial firms, the entrepreneur's time is one of the more salient resource constraint. Classifying the entrepreneurs' activities into four categories based on their revenue-related or process-related impact and short-term or long-term effects, we present a dynamic time allocation model for process improvement in gro...

This paper investigates the role of top management in the adoption of energy-efficiency initiatives. We study data from 175 energy efficiency assessments done by San Diego State University (SDSU) during 2000-2008 as part of the Department of Energy’s Industrial Assessment Center Program. We find that top management involvement leads to firms adopti...

Carbon footprinting is a tool for firms to determine the total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with their supply chain or with a unit of final product or service. Carbon footprinting efforts typically aim to identify where best to invest in emission reduction efforts, and/or to determine the proportion of total emissions that an individua...

We investigate the adoption of energy efficiency initiatives using information on over 100,000 recommendations provided to more than 13,000 small and medium sized firms under the Industrial Assessment Centers (IAC) program of the US Department of Energy (DOE). We build on an earlier study by Anderson and Newell (2004) that explored the impact of ec...

This article discusses how environmental impacts are measured in supply chains, starting with an overview of environmental impact measurement in general, then discussing studies of environmental impacts in traditional forward supply chains, in extended supply chains with disposal, and in closed-loop supply chains, respectively.

The literature on mass customization generally focuses on the tradeoff between higher revenues from better matching customer preferences with product specifications, and higher costs of offering a broader - possibly fully customized - product line. Less well-understood is the tradeoff between the increased ability to precisely meet customer prefere...

We present a model of dynamic resource allocation in a setting where continuity of service is important and future resource availability is uncertain. The paper is inspired by the challenges faced by HIV clinics in resource-limited settings in the allocation of scarce HIV treatment among a large pool of eligible patients. Many clinics receive insuf...

This paper is inspired by the recurring mismatch between demand and supply in the U.S. influenza vaccine market. Economic theory predicts that an oligopolistic market with unregulated but costly entry will experience excess entry and oversupply, not the undersupply observed in the market for influenza vaccine in recent years. In this paper, we exam...

Few studies have rigorously evaluated the associations between organizational characteristics and intervention activities of health care organizations participating in quality improvement collaboratives (QICs). To examine the relationship between clinic characteristics and intervention activities by primary care clinics that provide HIV care and th...

We investigate the adoption and non-adoption of energy efficiency initiatives using a database of over 100,000 recommendations provided to more than 13,000 small and medium sized manufacturing firms. Even though the average payback across all recommendations is just over one year, many of these profitable opportunities are not implemented. Using a...

In Corbett and Kirsch (2001), we used a simple regression in an exploratory investigation of drivers of global diffusion of ISO 14000 certification. We found that ISO 9000 certification levels, environmental treaties ratified, and exports as a proportion of GDP were the main significant variables, where the environmental measure may be moderated by...

The ISO 9000 series of quality management systems standards and the more recent ISO 14000 environmental management systems standards have generated much controversy among practitioners. Although ISO 9000 has become a de facto requirement for many firms, its effects are poorly understood, and similarly the value and domain of applicability of ISO 14...

We study the adoption and non-adoption of energy efficiency initiatives using a database of over 100,000 recommendations provided to more than 13,000 small and medium sized manufacturing firms. The recommendations run the entire gamut of operational improvements including equip-ment modification, operating procedures and management practices. Even...

The importance of meta-standards in operational management for establishing rationalized operational processes, is discussed. Meta-standards refer to standards that apply to broad processes for efficient operational management. Several governmental and non-governmental, and voluntary or mandatory standards are being used in the global food industry...

We study competition between two multiproduct firms with distinct production technologies in a market where customers have heterogeneous preferences on a single taste attribute. The mass customizer (MC) has a perfectly flexible production technology and thus can offer any variety within a product space, represented by Hotelling's linear city. The m...

We study competition between two multi-product firms with distinct production technologies in a market where customers have heterogeneous preferences on a single taste attribute. The mass customizer (MC) has a perfectly flexible production technology, thus can offer any variety within a product space, represented by Hotelling's (1929) linear city....

The ISO 9000 series of quality management systems standards is widely diffused, with over 560,000 sites certified in 152 countries (as of December 2003). Anecdotal evidence suggests that global supply chains contributed to this diffusion, in the following sense. Firms in Europe were the first to seek ISO 9000 certification in large numbers. They th...

We examine the role of signaling and of intrinsic benefits in the adoption of the individual elements of the voluntary LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) standards for green buildings. We use goodness-of-fit tests on data for all 442 LEED certified buildings and find that neither signaling nor pursuit of intrinsic benefits can ind...

This work empirically assesses the degree to which inventory decisions made by entrepreneurs and small businesses are informed by the logic underlying the newsvendor or base stock model and are influenced by the decision-maker's risk profile. We used a web- and email-based survey, combined with a telephone follow-up to elicit risk profiles, obtaini...

We study the global diffusion of ISO 9000 and ISO 14000 certification using a network diffusion framework. We start by investigating the presence and nature of contagion effects by defining alternative cross-country networks and testing their relative strength. Second, we study how the rate of diffusion differs between the two standards and between...

HIV / AIDS is a serious public health concern in many developing countries with preva-lence rates well over 20%. However, less than a …fth of the patients eligible for treatment and receive highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART). Supply chain management and logistics is often cited as one of the biggest challenges in scaling up HAART. In addi...

The view that adopting an environmental perspective on operations can lead to improved operations is in itself not novel; phrases such as "lean is green" are increasingly commonplace. The implication is that any operational system that has minimized inefficiencies is also more environmentally sustainable. However, in this paper we argue that the un...

We study the problem of the manager of a project consisting of two sub-projects or tasks which are outsourced to different subcontractors. The project manager earns more revenue from the project if it is completed faster, but he cannot observe how hard subcontractors work, only the stochastic duration of their tasks. We derive the optimal linear in...

Eppen (1979) showed that inventory costs in a centralized system increase with the correlation between multivariate normal product demands. Using multivariate stochastic orders, we generalize this statement to arbitrary distributions. We then describe methods to construct models with arbitrary dependence structure, using the copula of a multivariat...

The ISO 9000 series of quality management systems standards, introduced in 1986, has been adopted at over 560,000 locations worldwide. Anecdotal evidence suggests that firms can achieve internal benefits such as quality or productivity improvements or that certification can help firms maintain or increase their market share, or both. Others argue t...

In many supply chains consumption of indirect materials, sold by a supplier to a customer for use in her production process, can be reduced by efforts exerted by either party. Since traditional supply contracts provide no incentive for the supplier to exert such effort, shared-savings contracts have been proposed as a way to improve incentives in t...

In designing supply contracts, a supplier has to consider the type of contract he can offer and the information he has about the buyer’s cost structure. In this paper we provide a framework for fleshing out these two effects in the context of a simple single-supplier single-buyer supply chain facing price-sensitive deterministic demand. There are t...

Several approaches to the widely recognized challenge of managing product variety rely on the pooling effect. Pooling can be accomplished through the reduction of the number of products or stock-keeping units (SKUs), through postponement of differentiation, or in other ways. These approaches are well known and becoming widely applied in practice. H...

Large-scale industrial production processes face increasingly tight environmental constraints, which can be addressed through costly but relatively simple end-of-pipe solutions, or through cheaper but more subtle pollution prevention approaches. Achieving the process improvements necessary for pollution prevention is challenging due to the inherent...

This paper builds on recent work on measuring and evaluating environmental performance of a process using statistical process control (SPC) techniques. We propose the CUSUM chart as a tool to monitor emissions data so that abnormal changes can be detected in a timely manner, and we propose using process capability indices to evaluate environmental...

There are many materials for which the quantity needed by a firm is at best indirectly related to the quantity of final product produced by that firm, such as solvents in manufacturing processes or office supplies. For any such "indirect" materials, an inescapable incentive conflict exists: The buyer wishes to minimize consumption of these indirect...

Supply chains often consist of several tiers, with different numbers of firms competing at each tier. A major determinant of the structure of supply chains is the cost structure associated with the underlying manufacturing process. In this paper, we examine the impact of fixed and variable costs on the structure and competitiveness of supply chains...

The two critical factors distinguishing inventory management in a multifirm supply-chain context from the more traditional centrally planned perspective are incentive conflicts and information asymmetries. We study the well-known order quantity/reorder point (Q, r) model in a two-player context, using a framework inspired by observations during a c...

Pellton International, a multinational chemical firm, produces and sells PVB plastic to windscreen manufacturers in the automotive supply chain. The case describes Pellton's efforts to build a stronger supply-chain partnership with Basco, a key European customer and to extend their success to another large European customer, Perdirelli. The potenti...

Children in households reporting the receipt of free or reduced price school meals through the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) are more likely to have negative health outcomes than eligible nonparticipants. Assessing the causal effects of the program is made difficult, however, by the presence of endogenous selection into the program and syste...

In the supply-chain literature, an increasing body of work studies how suppliers can use incentive schemes such as quantity discounts to influence buyers' ordering behaviour, thus reducing the supplier's (and the total supply chain's) costs. Various functional forms for such incentive schemes have been proposed, but a critical assumption always mad...

Processes to solidify and streamline supplier-customer relationships can result in mutually beneficial commercial success.

Collaboration between OR groups following different ‘strands of practice’, namely adhering to different ways of conducting OR practice, is difficult. We demonstrate the existence of this problem in two contexts. Firstly, we found several different strands of practice within an independent, entrepreneurial OR firm. Though these strands had the poten...

Forming closer partnerships with suppliers or customers can yield substantial benefits, as a slew of examples in the business literature show. Though several characteristics of successful partnerships are brought up time and again - mutual trust, commitment to the partnership, open information exchange - the literature remains strangely silent on t...

Panel sessions on OR practice are a common event at conferences, but they often do not seem to lead to productive discussions or to generate new ideas. In this paper we identify reasons why this happens, based on our experiences with a semi-plenary panel session on the challenges of practicing OR, organized during the EURO XIV Conference in Jerusal...

Selection and execution of site decontamination projects is often best left to local authorities, in accordance with the subsidiarity principle, even though the budget for such projects is made available through a central authority. In this paper we suggest a practical budget allocation policy which a central authority can employ to allocate budget...

A major problem currently confronting central governments is how to optimally allocate resources for decontamination of polluted sites. ‘Optimally’ here refers to obtaining maximum environmental benefits with the limited resources available. An important issue in budget allocation is that of decentralization, given the magnitude of the information...

This paper is a first step towards a different way of looking at the practice of OR, with implications for practitioners and researchers alike. We make two key observations: 1) Looking at how OR practitioners perform individual projects will not lead to a full understanding of how OR practitioners perform individual projects. Instead, one has to ta...

Two of the major challenges facing business with respect to environmental issues are internalization and operationalization. Appropriate internalization is needed to ensure that the company's responses to environmental issues are consistent with its responses to other issues and with its long-term goals. For each environmental issue, different leve...

“Crisis? What crisis?” could also have been an appropriate title for this paper. The OR/MS literature contains more than enough papers addressing the crisis in OR/MS to take the matter seriously, but it is not always clear exactly what is meant by crisis. The complaints usually concern the perceived gap between theory and practice, pointing out tha...

Manufacturing strategy is increasingly recognized by academics as essential to achieving sustainable competitive advantage. It is important to distinguish clearly between internal competences and external measures of competitiveness; ensuring a proper link between the two is a critical factor for success. This article suggests that: competences don...

Kanban-controlled serial manufacturing systcms have recently received considerable attention. A large proportion of the literature on the topic is devoted to success stories. There is also an important modelbased effort in gaining insight into the behavior of such systems, in identifying important success factors, and ultimately in optimizing vario...

We use the global spread of ISO 9000 and ISO 14000 certification as a context to develop and test a model to examine the spatial and temporal characteristics of cross-country diffusion processes in a unified framework. The central questions in our analysis are whether diffusion of certification is subject to cross-country influences and if so what...

In supply chains, there are many materials for which the quantity needed is at best indirectly related to the quantity of final product produced by the firm, such as solvents in manufacturing processes. For any such "indirect" materials, an inescapable incentive conflict exists between supplier and buyer: the buyer wishes to minimize consumption of...