The roles of supply network centralities in firm performance and the moderating effects of reputation and export-orientation

Abstract

This study explores how supply network degree, closeness, and betweenness centralities affect firm performance, and the moderating effects of organizational reputation (measured by PageRank centrality) and export-orientation. The supply chain relationship empirical data are drawn from manufacturing and manufacturing service companies in Hong Kong, China. Social network analysis and moderated regression analysis were adopted to test the hypotheses for a sample of 814 focal firms with 3086 supply chain ties. The results indicate that in-degree and closeness centralities improve firm performance. Reputation is found to positively moderate the relationship between closeness and sales performance, but negatively moderates the relationship between betweenness and sales performance. Export-orientation has no effect on relationships. This study contributes to the literature by providing additional empirical evidence on the role of supply network position in firm performance. It also introduces PageRank centrality as a new measure of organizational reputation in a supply network.     

Infant Discrimination of a Morphologically Relevant Word‐Final Contrast

Six‐, 12‐, and 18‐month‐old English‐hearing infants were tested on their ability to discriminate nonword forms ending in the final stop consonants /k/ and /t/ from their counterparts with final /s/ added, resulting in final clusters /ks/ and /ts/, in a habituation–dishabituation, looking time paradigm. Infants at all 3 ages demonstrated an ability to discriminate this type of contrast, a contrast that constitutes one phonetic cue for the English morphological concepts of plural, possession, and person. These results suggest that across a significant portion of the development of infants' speech perception, this type of final contrast is discriminable.