…what do you do? Is so-called supplier default something you have even thought about? And what if this supplier is connected to others such that if one fails, others may fail too, like an unstable house of cards? That is what concerns Stephan Wagner, Christoph Bode and Philipp Koziol in their 2008 article on Supplier default dependencies: Empirical evidence from the automotive industry, one of the few articles I know of that deals specifically with this topic. Based on empirical data from automotive suppliers, they reveal that default dependencies among suppliers do often exist and can have significant consequences.

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