Porter's Competitive advantage is generally considered the bible in this area (value chain and competition). On supply chain, just look for operations research

Porter's Competitive advantage is generally considered the bible in this area (value chain and competition). On supply chain, just look for operations research, a lot of it came from the military and industrial research, but can be applied everywhere, say, dimensioning servers for concurrent users. Also, keep in mind that supply and value chains are very different. Let's take online mobile ads: - Supply chain: advertiser -> agency -> ad exchange -> website -> viewer - Value chain: website -> ad platform -> hosting service -> internet connection -> device -> OS -> browser -> viewer -> advertiser If someone controls the entirety of any of the links, they will hold an excessive market power, and will be able to extract excess profits. Let's say for example iPhones were the only smartphones in existence, Apple would be able to control what through them (unless the government took action in some way), extracting disproportionate profits. Now if there are 1000 smartphone manufacturers, competition between them would lower prices, pretty much killing excess profits from that link, which could be captured by other links in the chain.