Shashank Rao's research while affiliated with Auburn University and other places

The transformative research agenda encourages the pursuit of questions emphasizing societal welfare and well‐being outcomes rather than (just) focusing on narrow, incremental business‐related outcomes. This paper addresses that premise by examining those households at the social and economic bottom of the pyramid (BOP) that are intended to benefit most from the removal of trade barriers. The removal of these barriers should enable supply chains to yield commercial and welfare efficiency in terms of economic surpluses. The Goods and Services Tax legislation implemented in India in 2017 sought to do just that, serving as the experimental testbed for our investigation. Yet, as our analysis of more than 50,000 unique households in the Consumer Pyramids Household Survey data indicates, those at the social and geographic BOP see less benefit than others from the same policy intervention. This runs counter to the intended consequences of such policies. We employ a middle‐range theorizing approach grounded in the Theory of Customs Unions to inform and substantiate our hypotheses, which are tested using a stochastic frontier analysis and truncated regression. The results hold implications for policymakers and organizations seeking to elevate the efficacy of supply chains orchestrated by and serving BOP populations.

The rapid growth of Internet retail platforms (e.g., Shopify and Wix) and marketplaces (e.g., Amazon, eBay, and Etsy) has given rise to a new wave of entrepreneurship. These are platform entrepreneurs—individuals who establish micro‐retail businesses on third‐party platforms. While there are now millions of such entrepreneurs worldwide, there has been limited scholarly investigation regarding the role of Logistics and Supply Chain Management (LSCM) policies that they can adapt to benefit their small businesses. Because the success of such businesses is intricately driven by the reviews they receive, we deem it essential to investigate how such reviews may be related to their LSCM policies. We conduct an observational field study at one such small platform seller. By investigating items sold under varying merchandise return policies (MRPs), we seek to isolate the relationship between MRP, and the likelihood, positivity, and depth of the reviews left by shoppers. Based on the concept of contractuality , rooted in Sociometer Theory, our results reveal that a more lenient MRP may serve as a perk that may positively impact the customer's review writing. However, the relationship is not monotonic. Instead, there is evidence that the effect of extended MRP leniency on reviews tapers off beyond a certain point.

Much of the extant scholarship in supply chain management (SCM) has had a developed world focus, although most of the global population resides outside this area. SCM scholars are now recognizing this limitation in the coverage of our communities' research. They have recognized that the logistical challenges of getting products to these underserved markets at the bottom of the economic pyramid (BOP) may be fundamentally different from the “big box” mindset that prevails in the west. There is growing recognition that supply chain entrepreneurship is critical to the logistics and physical distribution systems that can get products to such markets in a cost‐effective manner. Yet, such entrepreneurs, who are often small, and weakly integrated into the global economy, face several challenges in their daily business. Many of them rely on microfinance to fund their business. Yet, the microfinance model itself is changing into a web‐supported crowdfunded model. The current study investigates how an entrepreneur's circumstances with regard to their borrowing status as a first‐time borrower, and their intent with regard to business expansion influence their success in fundraising on a crowdfunding platform. Results reveal that BOP entrepreneurs who are “repeat borrowers” have difficulty in obtaining funding for their business plans.

Emergency departments (EDs) are an integral part of many acute care hospitals. Recently, however, hospitals have been increasingly experimenting with a new type of ED, for example, freestanding emergency departments (FSEDs). These are EDs that are physically separate from acute care hospitals but provide many of the same services provided by traditional EDs. Because of this geographic decoupling between the parent hospital and the FSED, hospitals can potentially reach out and provide services to user groups that may otherwise have been located too far away to serve. While this sounds good in theory, some have argued that FSEDs often get located in geographically proximate markets, rather than truly underserved areas, thereby exacerbating health care inequities. The current study investigates hospitals setting up FSEDs and examines their accrued business impacts to the parent hospital. By gathering a panel dataset covering several years of FSED openings and hospital performance, we examine how market share and operating margins of parent hospitals are impacted when they set up FSEDs. Results indicate that while there are some positive performance implications for hospitals who create FSEDs, a majority of these benefits are seen only for the first FSED created. We contend that this finding is driven by the fact that FSEDs are unlikely to be able to truly reach out to untapped populations, on account of their inherent nature. In conclusion, we question whether FSEDs are indeed a scalable approach to increasing health care access and reach.

The microfinance business model focuses largely on lending to the woman in the household, rather than the man. The belief is that women are more trustworthy borrowers than men, and that lending to women may have increased social impact. Yet in several cases, women do not have control over the loan backed business despite being the borrower of record. Such takeover of the business by the man constitutes an ethical violation. We find that high dependency ratios in the family are correlates of such ethical violations. Further, we also find that ethical violations have a significant economic cost, consistent with prior scholarship in the family-business domain. While access to microfinance increases household welfare, this beneficial impact reduces by over 50% in the presence of an ethical violation. Our results suggest that microfinance lenders need to move beyond the traditional role of just being a lender to providing advice on issues like family planning, and money management, and enforcement, thus moving closer to the solidarity economy paradigm of integrating savings and credit into broader canvases of social relationships and social structures.

Considerable research on merchandise returns has looked at marketing elements of the sales process (e.g., product display) and how they influence returns. However, marketing and order fulfillment processes are temporally decoupled in remote purchase situations such as online retail. While both are intricate parts of the overall sales transaction, it is logical to believe that elements of order fulfillment may also be influential in explaining and controlling merchandise return. This study focuses on the packaging aspect of the order fulfillment process to explore how it may influence return incidents in online retail. Following insights from Signaling Theory, we propose that a product's package is a signal that communicates valuable information about the product to the buyer. We partner with an online retailer to study the outcome of a natural experiment involving product packaging during order fulfillment. Our results show that packaging influences returns, reducing them most significantly if the signaling is consistent across packaging levels.

While much has been written about resilience in the supply chain management (SCM) literature, most investigations focus on large corporations from the perspective of helping them bounce back after disruptions. There has been little investigation on resilience among the weakest and smallest members of the global supply chain—that is, small entrepreneurs at the bottom of the pyramid (BOP). This is despite the fact that these micro‐entrepreneurs are often key cogs in the last‐mile supply chain efforts of major multinational corporations. They experience disruptions at a higher rate than major corporations, have fewer formal mechanisms in place to recover from them, and are often unable to "bounce back" in the traditional sense. In the current study, we address this gap by investigating multiple types of disruptions (i.e., idiosyncratic and covariate) and how they impact entrepreneurial resilience among microbusinesses in an emerging economy. In addition, we look at the buffering impact of various actors (i.e., financial and social) on entrepreneurship in the face of these disruptions. We highlight the important role that these entrepreneurs play in the BOP supply chain and provide suggestions that can assist with improving their resilience and the resilience of the BOP supply chain.

The ability to look into the supply chain has long enticed SCM scholars and practitioners. The possibilities created by such visibility are endless—from risk reduction and continuity planning to inventory management and cost reduction, nothing is off the table when end‐to‐end visibility is a possibility. Because of such enticements, there is usually much buzz in the industry every time a new technology that promises visibility and transparency is brought forward. Yet, years later, stories sometimes emerge that said technologies either failed to deliver or were not everything they were made out to be. Blockchain is yet another emerging technology in this space. Some consultants promise that it will be the final answer to the transparency and visibility woes that companies currently face. Yet, there is little empirical investigation regarding how the technology may benefit adopters, what the bottlenecks may be, and to what extent it may be able to deliver on these promises, without massive system‐wide upgrades of extant hardware and computing prowess. The current study takes a step in this direction by investigating a blockchain‐driven proof of concept across an industry consortium to identify promises, possibilities, and challenges of blockchain.

Supply chain management contends with structures and processes for delivering goods and services to customers. It addresses the core functions of connected businesses to meet downstream demand. This innovative volume provides an authoritative and timely guide to the overarching issues that are ubiquitous throughout the supply chain. In particular, it addresses emerging issues that are applicable across supply chains—such as data science, financial flows, human capital, internet technologies, risk management, cyber security, and supply networks. With chapters from an international roster of leading scholars in the field, The Oxford Handbook of Supply Chain Management is a necessary resource for all students and researchers of the field as well as for forward-thinking practitioners.

Recent trade reports suggest that RFID implementation continues to lag lofty projections. A primary concern is that, despite the high cost of implementing RFID systems, realized read‐rates fall short of expectations. This results in the invisible inventory conundrum whereby tagged merchandise may still not be accurately represented in inventory records. Drawing from data science to address this issue, we ask: How can directed data mining models be used to identify laboratory test performance criteria for RFID tags that operate reliably across the idiosyncratic facilities (i.e., unique DCs, warehouses, and stores) that comprise apparel retailers’ supply chains? We investigate this question by advancing a methodology that integrates laboratory test performance data, field tests of RFID tags fixed to apparel items and scanned under normal operating conditions, and the application of five directed data mining models to the integrated data set of laboratory and field test results. Our analyses of 45,416 observations show that two directed data mining models may identify—with near‐100% accuracy—laboratory test criteria that discriminate tags having 99% or greater read‐rates in the field. Accordingly, our study validates a generalizable methodology for identifying technical performance standards for tags that operate reliably within apparel retailers’ supply chains.