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.
Warehouse workers are critical to the success of any business and supply chain. It is important to understand different factors that can influence an employee's performance and satisfaction at work. In order to determine some best practices, 173 students at Arizona State University participated in an online warehousing simulation in a controlled laboratory setting. Participants were subject to different combinations of time pressure and put-away errors (i.e. when items that need to be picked by a warehouse worker are not located where they are supposed to be). A preliminary analysis shows that the largest impact is that of time pressure on worker productivity. As time pressure increases, the time required to complete a task decreases. The trade-offs of using time pressure as a management option are discussed.