IN THIS ISSUE

Decision Sciences, Nov 2007 by Smith-Daniels, Vicki

STRATEGIES FOR JUMPING THE PRACTICE RELEVANCE HURDLE

For quite some time, business school academics have been challenged by the double hurdle of scholarly quality and practice relevance. Since its origin, the Decision Sciences journal has placed considerable importance on managerial relevance and the advancement of effective decision-making practices in private- and public-sector organizations. Nearly 3 years ago, Decision Sciences refocused its editorial mission to place greater emphasis on managerial relevance and interdisciplinary research. While the journal has made reasonable progress toward increasing managerial relevance, there is still much work to be done. After two decades of pursuing empirical-based and industry-driven research, many decision sciences scholars continue to raise concerns that our research lacks relevance to practice-both for practicing managers and for educating future managers in the business school classroom.

For senior academics, this message is not an entirely new one. So, what is different today? After a considerable push to promote the double hurdles of managerial relevance and scholarly quality, the majority of current decision sciences research still tends to strongly favor scholarly quality over practice relevance. Review panels are keenly aware of me importance of practice relevance and do a noble job of identifying papers with little or no practice relevance. However, it is my observation that reviewers truly struggle when mey are challenged by making trade-offs between rigor and relevance. That said, mere are an increasing number of decision sciences scholars who have successfully demonstrated that both hurdles can be jumped even when their heights are reasonably high. This encouraging trend must occur with a higher degree of frequency and involve significantly larger numbers of decision sciences scholars. Over the next year, Decision Sciences will publish a number of practice relevance commentaries. Beyond having a spirited discussion of me appropriate heights of me double hurdles, these commentaries will center on specific means for jumping a higher practice relevance hurdle as well as strategies for disseminating our research into the practice community.

As I thought about the inaugural commentary, I decided to approach highly visible scholars with a demonstrated track record of engaging industry in research partnerships. Almost immediately, closed-loop supply chains came to mind as me seeds for mis area were planted by the academic-industry research partnership lead of Professors Guide and Van Wassenhove. It is my hope that you find their article, "Dancing with the Devil: Partnering with Industry, but Publishing in Academia," to be inspirational and also of practical value to you in integrating industry into your research endeavors.

NONLINEAR DECISION-MAKING DYNAMICS IN SUPPLY NETWORKS

Increased reliance on suppliers has resulted in more complex, dynamic interactions between buyers and suppliers. At the same time, supply networks are increasing in their breadth and depth as more organizations outsource goods and services. Most information systems and operations management research examines supply chains from the lens of a single entity. Increasingly, interorganizational relationships and dyadic unit of analysis are being considered in empirical and quantitative research studies. This expanding interorganizational perspective on supply networks has high potential in shaping how industry designs and manages new business partnerships. In the article, "Complexity and Adaptivity in Supply Networks: Building Supply Network Theory Using a Complex Adaptive Systems Perspective," Professors Pathak, Day, Nair, Sawaya, and Kristal take the position that future supply chain management research must adopt a dynamic and systems-level orientation. Drawing from the Complex Adaptive System perspective, this article identifies several fruitful research areas for serious consideration by scholars considering publication in Decision Sciences. These targeted areas span the research interests of the entire Decision Sciences community and challenge researchers to work across organizational boundaries. In the spirit of the Decision Sciences editorial mission, future-related submissions should move research in this new direction.

STRATEGICALLY REDUCING AND CONTROLLING DEMAND UNCERTAINTY THROUGH DISTRIBUTION CHANNEL DESIGN

How to deal with demand uncertainty has become an increasingly important challenge facing modern managers. Demand uncertainty affects supply chains and their performances in many different ways, including influencing the choice of distribution channel. In their article, "Vertical Integration with Price-Setting Competitive Newsvendors," Wu, Petruzzi, and Chhajed probe beyond existing research and apply competitive newsvendor theory to address the issue of inventory and channel design in a setting in which multiple multiechelon supply chains compete through substitutable products in the presence of demand uncertainty. They underscore the importance of carefully identifying the possible impact of demand uncertainty, and show that demand uncertainty may or may not affect the optimal choice of distribution channel. They illustrate that, when demand uncertainty does have an impact on channel structure, reducing the number of decisions made in supply chains appears to be an effective way of reducing the impact of demand uncertainty. In addition, the aumors' work implies that supply chain integration might not necessarily be the best option in the presence of competition and demand uncertainty, because the presence of demand uncertainty may change the impact of other factors on supply chains, with some factors favoring an integrated structure and some favoring a decentralized distribution structure. (For example, unit production cost becomes a factor affecting the optimal choice of distribution chain only when demand uncertainty is present.) Wu, Petruzzi, and Chhajed establish the existence of equilibrium in a case of the manufacturer subgame under uniform distribution and find that the variance of demand uncertainty does not necessarily play a role in determining the equilibrium channel structure. Their results provide insight into qualitative similarities and differences between me structural properties of the equilibrium distribution channel structure when demand is, and is not, uncertain. Wang and Wei's work contributes to me growing field of research on the impact of demand uncertainty on distribution channel design.