Four essays on the interface between marketing and operations in supply chain management

This dissertation consists of four essays that contribute in the investigation of the interface between marketing and operations in supply chain management (SCM). The main motivations behind this work relate to the evolution of SCM, which goes from a mere logistic function expanded across inter-organizational boundaries to a systematic coordination and integration of traditional business functions. This evolution pushes researchers and practitioners to think about SCM as a sophisticated and complex phenomenon that need to be further explored.;This dissertation provides four essays and each of them carries out specific motivations and addresses precise issues. The first essay empirically investigates which business function, between marketing and operations, contributes the most to firms' corporate performance in SCM. On the other hand, the research provides prescriptive insights to managers on how to boost the effectiveness of SCM on corporate performance when focusing either on operations or on marketing activities while adopting specific managerial levers. The second essay draws a detailed map identifying the current research gaps to be eventually filled. It laborates information from 108 papers published over the last thirty years and provides the ongoing research directions to be undertaken by future studies investigating the interface between marketing and operations in SCM. The third essay introduces a differential game of marketing and operations modeling both vertical coordination and horizontal SC competition. It highlights the interfaces between marketing and operational strategies in a contest of symmetric competition. The main result concerns the effect of coordination on competition. When the SCs are not coordinated, competition is played only on price. Conversely, when the SCs are coordinated, competition is played on both pricing and advertising. Coordination intensifies SC competition and turns out to be economically ineffective. The last essay shows the advantages of integrating marketing and operational strategies in an atypical supply chain (e.g., closed-loop supply chain) where economic, environmental, and social issues occur simultaneously.;The main result concerns the effectiveness of coordination and the additional knowledge supplied when having dynamic returns to better understand the interfaces between marketing and operations. Summarizing, this dissertation shows the evaluable research findings obtainable when a complex phenomenon like SCM is analyzed from different perspetives, such as marketing and operations. Future research in the domain of SCM should pay more attention to the interfaces and the integration between business functions' strategies to provide realible, complete and prescriptive managerial insights and research findings.