Supplier Certification and Quality Investment in Supply Chains

Global sourcing has made quality management a more challenging task, and supplier certification has emerged as a solution to overcome suppliers' informational advantage about their product quality. This article analyzes the impact of certification standards on the supplier's investment in quality, when a buyer outsources the production process. Based on our results, deterministic certification may lead to under-investment in quality improvement technology for efficient suppliers, thereby leading to potential supply chain inefficiency. The introduction of noisy certification may alleviate this under-investment problem, when the cost of information asymmetry is high. While allowing noisy certification always empowers the buyer to offer a menu to screen among heterogeneous suppliers, the buyer may optimally choose only a limited number of certification standards. Our analysis provides a clear-cut prediction of the types of certifiers the buyer should use for heterogeneous suppliers, and we identify the conditions under which the supplier benefits from noisy certification. (C) 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 60: 175-189, 2013