Group purchasing research

The advantages of group purchasing should outweigh related disadvantages in a large number of cases. However, several cooperative initiatives do not flourish or do not exist at all.

In the Ph.D. project of Fredo Schotanus described here at www.grouppurchasing.eu we study issues playing an important role in the success of purchasing consortia. Related empirical questions are: When to use which organizational form? How to develop a purchasing group? Examples of analytical questions are: Should cooperative costs be allocated proportionally? No, equally is usually better. Should gains be allocated by using a same price concept? No, cooperative game theory often gives better alternatives. Theoretically, should small organizations cooperate with small ones, and large with larges ones? Yes, this gives usually an optimal solution. Furthermore we analyze critical success factors and topics as the optimal size of different forms of cooperative initiatives.

More general empirical topics are:

A Basic Foundation for Cooperative Purchasing
Implications of a Classification for Cooperative Purchasing
Implications of a Development Model for Cooperative Purchasing
A Large-Scale Survey

And more general analytical topics are:

Unraveling Quantity Discounts

(Un)fair Allocation of Gains and Costs
Unfair Allocation of the Equal Price Method

The Optimal Size of a Cooperative

How to Solve an Allocation Problem?

On this part of our website you can find several English and Dutch publications, tools, and presentations on these (related) topics.