Historically, Life Cycle Assessments (LCA) guided companies to make better decisions to improve the environmental impacts of their products. However, as new Circular Economy (CE) tools emerge, the usefulness of LCA in assessing linear products grow more and more obsolete. Research Question: How do LCA-based tools account for reuse/multiple life cycles of products verses CE-based tools?
The Kaiteki Innovation Framework (KIF) was used to address the question of circularity of two packaging materials using an Environmental LCA to populate its 12 CE dimensions. Any gaps were evaluated with 2 LCA- based and 2 CE-based tools to see which could address the leftover CE dimensions.
Results showed that to complete the KIF template, LCA data required one of the LCA-based tools: Social Life Cycle Assessment (SLCA) and both CE-based tools: Circular Transition Indicators (CTI) and Material Circularity Indicator (MCI) to supplement gaps in the KIF. The LCA addressed 5 of the KIF dimensions: Innovation Category Name, Description, GHG Impact, Other Environmental Impacts, and Value Chain Position. 3 analytical tools addressed 5 more:: Effect on Circularity, Social Impacts, Enabling Technologies, Tier 2 and 3 Requirements, and Value Chain Synergies. None of the tools could address the KIF Dimensions: State of Development or Scale Requirements. All in all, the KIF required both LCA-based and CE-based tools to cover social and socio-economic impacts from a cradle-to-cradle perspective with multiple circular loops in mind. These results can help in the research and development of innovative, circular products that can lead to a more environmentally preferred future.
In the first essay, I investigate the financial impact of a buyer-initiated supplier-focused sustainability improvement program on suppliers’ profitability. The results indicate that a supplier sustainability program may lead to short-term financial loss but long-term financial gain for suppliers, and this effect is contingent on supplier slack resources. The second essay of this dissertation focuses on the consumers and investigates their reactions to two types of firm environmental sustainability claims – sustainable production versus sustainable consumption. The results indicate that firm sustainable consumption claims increase consumers’ purchase, thus leads to larger firm sales, whereas firm sustainable production claims decrease consumers’ buying intention, then result in smaller firm sales. Therefore, I show that, contrary to extant belief, firm environmental sustainability can decrease consumers’ intention to buy. Finally, a firm may be impacted when some of its upstream or downstream stakeholders, or its own operations, are impacted by a natural disaster, which are becoming more frequent due to climate change. In the third essay I study the joint effect of market attention and donation timing on firm stock returns based on the experiences of firms who donated to the 2017 Hurricane Harvey. I conclude that neither the first donors nor the followers can mitigate the negative stock returns due to disasters. However, firms who match their donation timing with market attention experience less negative stock market returns compared to other counterparts.
Buyers often make supplier selection decisions under conditions of uncertainty. Although the analytical aspects of supplier selection are well developed, the psychological aspects are less so. This article uses supply chain management and behavioral decision theories to propose that attributes of the purchasing situation (category difficulty, category importance, and contingent pay) affect cognition that, in turn, affects a supply manager's choice. We conducted a supplier selection behavioral experiment with practicing managers to test the model's hypotheses. When the context involves an important or difficult sourcing category, higher risk perceptions exist that increase preference for a supplier with more certain outcomes, even when that choice has a lower expected payoff. However, the presence of contingent pay decreases risk perceptions through higher perceived supplier control. We also find that a manager's risk propensity increases preferences for a supplier with less certain outcomes regardless of perceived risk. Our model and results provide a theoretical framework for further study into the cognitive aspects of supplier selection behavior and provide insight into biases that influence practicing supply chain managers.