Cost Reduction Tendency and Collaboration Agreements in Supply Chain Asymmetric Relationships

A supply chain can be constructed as a collaborative network, containing asymmetric or symmetric relationships and interactions between companies or entities. Collaboration between companies represent real opportunities to enhance their relationships and to help organizations adapt to increasing difficulties in asymmetric environments (Aryee et al., 2008). Collaboration seeks alternatives that address the needs of new resources and achievement of collective goals established agreements between two or more organizations for participation to carry out joint planning and management for overall supply chain performance (Aryee et al., 2008). Theoretical support for the concepts of cost, collaboration and performance in a dynamic environment has been found, through an extensive literature review in Transaction Cost Theory. Hence, we aim to address the research question: what exactly is the impact of cost reduction tendency in SC performance under different level of collaboration? We hope results of this investigation clarify real problems cost reduction tendency in supply chain collaborations processes. The process of data collection will be developed following the model proposed in the literature to be able to obtain its scientific validity (Churchill and Iacobucci, 2005). For the data collection a survey will carried out using a questionnaire. A questionnaire consists of two parts. The first part, using a nominal scale, include firm characteristics, e.g. business type, number of full-time employees, firm revenue, property structure. The second part include the measurement constructs of the research model. The research unit will an individual company in various industrial sectors. Firms included in sample will selected randomly. The companies will be contacted by phone to identify the most appropriate respondent in the company (typically the general manager or a director from SCM) to fill in the questionnaire. Following the tailored-design method for surveys (Dillman, 2000) each respondent will be contacted several times and by different means (phone, mail, e-mail) to achieve a high response rate. The outcomes of the cost reduction processes are very important to the decision makers. Traditional collaboration policies and measures focus on dealing with specific problems. Generally, this approac