Black swan risk management: The moderation effect of risk mitigation strategies

Many scholars have discussed supply chain risk mitigation on operational risks, but less on rare, highly influential, and retrospective predictable risks, such as natural disasters, epidemics, and socio-political crises. They are Black Swan risks (Taleb, 2007). More than disrupting supply chains, Black Swan risks even threaten companies’ survival (Taleb, Goldstein and Spitznagel, 2009). Strategies, such as the Triple-A supply chain (Lee, 2004), robust strategies (Tang, 2006a), flexibility (Tang and Tomlin, 2008), agility (Braunscheidel and Suresh, 2009), and postponement (Yang and Yang, 2010), have been well discussed to provide insights to supply chain risk mitigation. However, little attention has been devoted to linking these risk mitigation strategies to focal company performance to evaluate their efforts. Although it is intuitive that risk mitigation strategies moderate the relationship between supply chain risks and focal company performance, the vast majority of the extant literature is descriptive and anecdotal. The purpose of this study is to test the moderating role of risk mitigation strategies in the relationship between Black Swan risks and focal company performance. As operational risks and Black Swan risks are not mutually exclusive, we postulate that companies can utilize existing strategies with more targeting solutions to minimize their exposure to Black Swan risks.