Melek Akin Ates is awarded the DSI Conference 2011 Best Student Paper Prize

At the Decision Science 2011 conference in Boston (USA), the Best Student Paper Prize was presented to Melek Akin Ates for her paper titled "The link between purchasing strategy and purchasing structure". The co-autors are Erik van Raaij and Finn Wynstra who are supervising Melek in her PhD thesis project titled "Organizing Purchasing for Innovation". The paper examines the contingency relationship between purchasing strategies (cost versus innovation focus) and purchasing structure (centralization, formalization, cross-functionality). Different than earlier studies, in this study the focus is the purchasing organization design at the purchase category level instead of the overall organizational level. The data used in the study is from the first round of the International Purchasing Survey (IPS) project (www.ipsurvey.org). the authors conclude that organizational design characteristics do not only differ per purchasing strategy, but also purchasing processes.