Article Abstract
Suppliers to multinational corporations are under growing strain. Tariffs, logistics disruptions, rising compliance demands, and repeated global shocks have raised the cost of serving large corporate buyers. Recent studies suggest that many large buyers pass at least part of these additional costs down to suppliers rather than sharing the burden. For many suppliers—especially smaller firms and those in developing economies—the problem is not simply that costs are rising. It is that they are often expected to absorb those costs while continuing to meet the same standards for quality, delivery, auditing, and compliance.
Harvard Business Review, July 2026
About the researcher
Medo Pournader is a Senior Lecturer and Program Director of Master of Supply Chain Management with the Department of Management and Marketing at the University of Melbourne. Prior to her appointment at University of Melbourne, Medo was a Lecturer of Management (Operations and Supply Chain Management) and MBA program coordinator at Macquarie Business School, Macquarie University.
Medo's research interests are at the intersection of behavioral operations and supply chain, risk, sustainability/ethics and technology management. In particular, most of her projects are on decision making processes surrounding supplier sustainability risks or technology adoption in supply chains.
Medo is on editorial boards of Journal of Supply Chain Management (Associate Editor and Reviewer), Journal of Business Logistics (Senior Editor), Journal of Business Ethics (Section Editor - Supply Chains, Inter-Organisational Networks and Business Ethics), Decision Sciences Journal (reviewer), and International Journal of Production Economics (Reviewer).
About the researcher
Niharika Garud is an Associate Professor in Management, and Associate Dean (Engagement) at the Faculty of Business & Economics at University of Melbourne. She is also a Research Fellow at Centre for Asian Business & Economics and Change Management Theme Coordinator, Building CRC 4.0 initiative. Niharika's interests for research, teaching, executive education, engagement and industry collaborations lie in areas of management, particularly technology and innovation management, R&D management (management of scientists, product development teams and processes, innovation labs, engineering management), organizational behavior (management of people, performance, leadership and teams, especially in knowledge and tech intensive industries), judgment and decision-making (how people make decisions, such as in workplaces, in entrepreneurship, e.g. startups). She works in interdisciplinary management research projects with industry partners. Her research has been published in top management journals, such as Journal of Management, Journal of Organizational Behavior, Personnel Psychology, Harvard Business Review, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, Entrepreneurship & Regional Development, Management & Organization Review, Journal of Small Business Management, International Journal of Human Resource Management among others. She has won numerous awards, grants and fellowships for research, teaching, engagement in USA, Asia, Australia.