Business & Entrepreneurship

Academics who assembled at Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis offered such relevant presentations, research and ideas — a full nine months before a pandemic derailed, if not stymied, global operations — that it produced a special edition in scholarship: how to pay for production and distribution today and manage global risks in a highly uncertain environment. Supply Chain Finance and Fin Tech Innovations was published Oct. 1 as the 14th volume of Foundations and Trends in Technology, Information and Operations Management.

Xiumin Martin from the Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis was among four researchers who crunched data to find that personal connections between suppliers and vendors particularly improves the efficiency of the supply chain. To be precise, such rapport results in better overall performance, less restrictive and longer-lasting contract terms, and crystallized communication.

In the future, a global pandemic such as the magnitude of COVID-19 will not only be a foreseeable event, but also will likely change how companies model and mitigate future risks to their supply chains, says an expert on supply chain management at Washington University’s Olin Business School.

The $2 trillion plan to prop up a pandemic-reeling United States, amid the news that there were 3.3 million unemployment claims lodged in the previous week, is expected to pass the House on March 27. An array of Washington University in St. Louis experts offer perspectives on the plan.

Olin Business School faculty at Washington University in St. Louis offer perspectives on the economic, financial and everyday business reactions to the novel coronavirus outbreak.

Panos Kouvelis, who teaches and helped to popularize the Waffle House Index regarding natural-disaster responses, says the outbreak’s impact on global supply chains promises to be two times worse than when the SARS virus emerged in 2002 in China.

Two Washington University in St. Louis researchers, along with a former fellow Olin Business School faculty member and Alibaba officials, flipped the pop-up business model, and possibly more. The co-authors found that inviting potential customers via text message could increase buying with both a pop-up shop retailer and similar product vendors online … for weeks and months to come.

Researchers from Olin Business School explore the complexity of tariffs as a trade tool in a global economy in a new paper. The research also establishes a supply chain model to explain those effects. The model proposes that, in some cases, the effects were foreseeable when accounting for strategic multi-party interactions and competition.

Two Olin Business School researchers at Washington University in St. Louis are highlighted in a new federal report issued March 27 showing how U.S. farmers — facing a surge of weather events and disease outbreaks — can increase production and revenues with innovations produced by government-funded agricultural research.