Balancing Inventory and Stockout Risk in Retail Supply Chains Using Fast‐Ship

In this study, we consider a two‐retailer, one‐supplier supply chain in which retailers satisfy excess demand by offering to directly ship out‐of‐stock items on an expedited basis at no extra cost to customers. This practice is referred to as the fast‐ship option. We consider two scenarios along with the fast‐ship option. In the first scenario, retailers transship when out of stock, whereas in the second scenario, they do not. If they do not transship, some customers may perform the search on their own. In each scenario, the wholesale prices are either exogenous, or chosen endogenously by the supplier. For both cases, we determine the supplier's and the retailers’ optimal decisions. The key research question we ask and answer is the following: which of the two scenarios is preferred by either player when all decisions are made optimally? We show that when fewer customers are willing to search on their own and wholesale prices are exogenous, both the supplier and the retailers prefer to transship. In addition, the decision maker in a centralized chain will have the exact same preference as that of players in a decentralized setting when the retailers’ and the supplier's preferences coincide and wholesale prices are exogenous. This preference concordance does not hold if wholesale prices are endogenous.     

Managing Slow‐Moving Perishables in the Grocery Industry

We address the value of information and value of centralized control in the context of a two‐echelon, serial supply chain with one retailer and one supplier that provide a single perishable product to consumers. Our analysis is relevant for managing slow‐moving perishable products with fixed lot sizes and expiration dates of a week or less. We evaluate two supply chain structures. In the first structure, referred to as decentralized information sharing, the retailer shares its demand, inventory, and ordering policy with the supplier, yet both facilities make their own profit‐maximizing replenishment decisions. In the second structure, centralized control, incentives are aligned and the replenishment decisions are coordinated. The latter supply chain structure corresponds to the industry practices of company‐owned stores or vendor‐managed inventory. We measure the value of information and value of centralized control as the marginal improvement in expected profits that a supply chain achieves relative to the case when no information is shared and decision making is decentralized. Key assumptions of our model include stochastic demand, lost sales, and fixed order quantities. We establish the importance of information sharing and centralized control in the supply chain and identify conditions under which benefits are realized. As opposed to previous work on the value of information, the major benefit in our setting is driven by the supplier's ability to provide the retailer with fresher product. By isolating the benefit by firm, we show that sharing information is not always Pareto‐improving for both supply chain partners in the decentralized setting.     

基于顾客战略行为下的供应链系统的绩效研究

供应链系统由一个供应商、一个零售商和顾客群组成,且顾客具有战略行为特征,其可以选择在一级市场上购买,也可以选择在二级市场上购买。在销售第一期,零售商向供应商提出订购,并在一级市场上销售,期末剩余产品被供应商回购;在销售第二期,供应商把回购产品通过直销渠道在二级市场上进行销售。采用参数分析和数值模拟得出,首先,顾客战略行为对供应链系统订购量、及系统总收益是否有负影响,取决于顾客对二级市场产品接受度。其次,分散管理系统中,通过提供依赖于集中管理系统下的最优订购量的回购合同,供应商能够协调分散管理系统;并且,无论是否存在顾客战略行为,分散管理系统中的最优回购价格均不受影响。最后,零售商是否接受回购合同,依赖于是否存在顾客战略行为,以及顾客对二级市场产品的接受度。     

Pay‐Back‐Revenue‐Sharing Contract in Coordinating Supply Chains with Random Yield

We consider coordination issues in supply chains where supplier's production process is subject to random yield losses. For a simple supply chain with a single supplier and retailer facing deterministic demand, a pay back contract which has the retailer paying a discount price for the supplier's excess units can provide the right incentive for the supplier to increase his production size and achieve coordination. Building upon this result, we consider coordination issues for two other supply chains: one with competing retailers, the other with stochastic demand. When retailers compete for both demand and supply, they tend to over‐order. We show that a combination of a pay back and revenue sharing mechanism can coordinate the supply chain, with the pay back mechanism correcting the supplier's under‐producing problem and the revenue sharing mechanism correcting the retailers' over‐ordering problem. When demand is stochastic, we consider a modified pay‐back‐revenue‐sharing contract under which the retailer agrees to not only purchase the supplier's excess output (beyond the retailer's order), but also share with the supplier a portion of the revenue made from the sales of the excess output. We show that this contract, by giving the supplier additional incentives in the form of revenue share, can achieve coordination.     

Role of Random Capacity Risk and the Retailer in Decentralized Supply Chains with Competing Suppliers

This research considers a supply chain under the following conditions: (i) two heterogeneous suppliers are in competition, (ii) supply capacity is random and pricing is endogenous, (iii) consumer demand, with and without an intermediate retailer, is price dependent. Specifically, we examine how uncertainty in supply capacity affects optimal ordering and pricing decisions, supplier and retailer profits, and the incentives to reduce such uncertainty. When two suppliers sell through a monopolistic retailer, supply uncertainty not only affects the retailer's diversification strategy for replenishment, but also changes the suppliers’ wholesale price competition and the incentive for reducing capacity uncertainty. In this dual‐sourcing model, we show that the benefit of reducing capacity uncertainty depends on the cost heterogeneity between the suppliers. In addition, we show that a supplier does not necessarily benefit from capacity variability reduction. We contrast this incentive misalignment with findings from the single‐supplier case and a supplier‐duopoly case where both suppliers sell directly to market without the monopolistic retailer. In the latter single‐supplier and duopoly cases, we prove that the unreliable supplier always benefits from reducing capacity variability. These results highlight the role of the retailer's diversification strategy in distorting a supplier's incentive for reducing capacity uncertainty under supplier price competition.     

The Impact of Information Sharing and Advance Order Information on a Supply Chain with Balanced Ordering

This paper considers a supply chain with one supplier and multiple retailers that face exogenous heterogeneous end‐customer demands, where all parties utilize base‐stock policies. Each retailer is restricted to order once in every order cycle and their orders are replenished in a balanced manner within the cycle. Our study investigates the impact of information sharing and advance order information (AOI) on the supply chain. We find that the supplier benefits from the two mechanisms via two important factors, the information about observed end‐customer demands and the decision on re‐establishing the replenishment sequence. We derive the supplier's optimal sequence for stochastically comparable end‐customer demands with AOI and propose a sequencing rule for the setting with information sharing. Our numerical study examines the cost impacts of two proposed mechanisms on the entire supply chain.     

Push and Pull Contracts in a Local Supply Chain with an Outside Market*

Wholesale price contracts are widely studied in a single supplier‐single retailer supply chain, but without considering an outside market where the supplier may sell if he gets a high enough price and the retailer may buy if the price is low enough. We fill this gap in the literature by studying push and pull contracts in a local supplier–retailer supply chain with the presence of an outside market. Taking the local supplier's maximum production capacity and the outside market barriers into account, we identify the Pareto set of the push and/or pull contracts and draw managerial implications. The main results include the following. First, the most inefficient point of the pull Pareto set cannot always be removed by considering both the push and pull contracts. Second, the supplier's production capacity plays a significant role in the presence of an outside market; it affects the supplier's negotiating power with the retailer and the coordination of the supply chain can be accomplished only with a large enough capacity. Third, the import and export barriers influence the supply chain significantly: (i) an export barrier in the local market and the supplier's production capacity influence the supplier's export strategy; (ii) a low import (resp., export) barrier in the local market can improve the local supply chain's efficiency by use of a push (resp., pull) contract; and (iii) a high import (resp., export) barrier in the local market encourages the supplier (resp., retailer) to bear more inventory risk.     

Allocating Capacity with Demand Competition: Fixed Factor Allocation*

We consider a supply chain consisting of a supplier and two retailers. The supplier sells a single product to the retailers, who, in turn, retail the product to customers. The supplier has limited production capacity, and the retailers compete for the supplier's capacity and are duopolists engaged in Cournot competition for their customers. When the sum of the retailers' orders exceeds the supplier's capacity, the supplier allocates his capacity according to a preannounced allocation rule. We propose a new capacity allocation rule, fixed factor allocation, which incorporates the ideas of proportional and lexicographic allocations: it prioritizes retailers as in lexicographic allocation, but guarantees only a fixed proportion of the total available capacity to the prioritized retailer. We show that (1) the fixed factor allocation rule incorporates lexicographic and proportional allocations from the perspectives of the supplier and the supply chain; (2) under fixed factor allocation, the supply chain profit is not affected by the allocation factor when it is greater than a threshold; (3) the retailers share the supply chain profit with the supplier depending on the value of the allocation factor; and (4) the fixed factor allocation coordinates the supply chain when the market size is sufficiently large. We also compare fixed factor with proportional and lexicographic allocations, respectively. Furthermore, we demonstrate how the supplier can optimize his capacity level and wholesale price under fixed factor allocation.     

Contracting and Coordination under Asymmetric Production Cost Information

We analyze a supply chain consisting of a supplier and a retailer. The supplier's unit production cost, which characterizes his type, is only privately known to him. When trading with the retailer, the supplier demands a reservation profit that depends on his unit production cost. We model this problem as a game of adverse selection. In this model, the retailer offers a menu of contracts, each of which consists of two parameters: the ordering quantity and the supplier's share of the channel profit. We show that the optimal contract depends critically on a surrogate measure—the ratio of the types’ reservation profit differential to their production cost differential. An important implication from our analysis is that information asymmetry alone does not necessarily induce loss in channel efficiency. The optimal contract can coordinate the supply chain as long as the low‐cost supplier's cost efficiency is neither much overvalued nor much undervalued in the outside market. We further discuss the retailer's preference of the supplier's type under different market conditions, as well as evaluate the effects of the supplier's reservation profit, the retail price, and the demand uncertainty on the optimal contract.     

Distributional and Peer‐Induced Fairness in Supply Chain Contract Design

Members of a supply chain often make profit comparisons. A retailer exhibits peer‐induced fairness concerns when his own profit is behind that of a peer retailer interacting with the same supplier. In addition, a retailer exhibits distributional fairness when his supplier's share of total profit is larger than his own. While existing research focuses exclusively on distributional fairness concerns, this study investigates how both types of fairness might interact and influence economic outcomes in a supply chain. We consider a one‐supplier and two‐retailer supply chain setting, and we show that (i) in the presence of distributional fairness alone, the wholesale price offer is lower than the standard wholesale price offer; (ii) in the presence of both types of fairness, the second wholesale price is higher than the first wholesale price; and (iii) in the presence of both types of fairness, the second retailer makes a lower profit and has a lower share of the total supply chain profit than the first retailer. We run controlled experiments with subjects motivated by substantial monetary incentives and show that subject behaviors are consistent with the model predictions. Structural estimation on the data suggests that peer‐induced fairness is more salient than distributional fairness.     

供应链库存协调策略研究

研究和分析了直运型供应链通过共同补给期协调库存的策略问题。在该供应链中,单一供应商提供单一产品给面临随机需求的单一零售商。在所提出的库存协调策略条件下,供应商指定共同补给期,当零售商按供应商指定的共同补给期作为其订货周期时,供应商提供零售商一定的价格折扣。这种协调策略可以视为Stackelberg博弈。在阐述了解决该博弈问题的方法后,进行了数值实验,分析了采用这种协调策略的利益。     

Fairness in Selling to the Newsvendor

This paper studies the impact of fairness concerns on supply chain performance (SCP) in the two‐party newsvendor setting. We extend prior fairness analysis to a wide range of demand distributions, and also allow the degree and definition of fairness to assume a broader range of preferences than those in prior literature. Contrary to prior literature, we find that if the retailer's ideal allocation to the supplier is not sufficiently large, regardless of demand variability, a fair‐minded retailer makes no difference to system efficiency when facing a traditional profit‐maximizing supplier. Only when the retailer's ideal allocation to the supplier is above a threshold can the retailer's fairness concern improve the system efficiency for sufficiently high demand uncertainty. In order for the retailer's fairness concern to improve expected profits of both parties compared to the traditional supply chain case (win–win), the demand uncertainty cannot be too low, the retailer is not very averse to disadvantageous inequity, and his ideal allocation to the supplier is within a specific range. If only the supplier is concerned for fairness, the results range from worsening to improving (but not coordinating) the system and a win–win situation is impossible. Finally, when both the supplier and retailer are fair‐minded, SCP is improved unless both parties prefer to allocate small portions of system profit to the other. Again, win–win will be achieved only when the demand uncertainty is sufficiently high, the retailer's ideal allocation is within a certain range, and he is not very averse to disadvantageous inequity.     

公平感对供应链成员定价决策影响的研究

本文研究公平感对由一个供应商和一个零售商组成的二级供应链中的定价决策的影响,其中供应商决定批发价格,零售商在接受供应商批发价格合同之后决定零售价格,市场需求受到零售价格的线性影响.采用管理实验方法得出,首先,供应商的批发价格和零售商的零售价格均分别低于完全理性假设下的均衡解;供应商是利他性的,即,乐于看到零售商收益的增加,并且,供应商认为零售商是完全理性的,即零售商的决策目标是最大化自身收益;然而,零售商却是刻毒性的,即乐于看到供应商收益的减少.其次,批发价格的变异度大于零售价格的,即供应商决策的难度大于零售商的.给管理者的启示是:供应商应考虑零售商的刻毒性的特征,降低批发价格,以提高零售商接受供应商所提批发价格的概率;此外,还应该为供应商提供辅助决策手段,以降低批发价格的变异度,提高决策的准确性     

Vertical cost information sharing in a supply chain with value-adding retailers

We consider a supply chain consisting of one supplier and two value-adding heterogeneous retailers. Each retailer has full knowledge about his own value-added cost structure that is unknown to the supplier and the other retailer. Assuming there is no horizontal information sharing between two retailers, we model the supply chain with a three-stage game-theoretic framework. In the first stage each retailer decides if he is willing to vertically disclose his private cost information to the supplier. In the second stage, given the information he has about the retailers, the supplier announces the wholesale price to the retailers. In response to the wholesale price, in the third stage, the retailers optimize their own retail prices and the values added to the product, respectively. Under certain conditions, we prove the existence of equilibrium prices and added values. Furthermore, we obtain the condition under which both retailers are unwilling to vertically share their private information with the supplier, as well as the conditions under which both retailers have incentives to reveal their cost information to the supplier, thus leading to a win–win situation for the whole supply chain.     

Coordination in a Single‐Supplier,Multi‐Retailer Distribution System: Supplier‐Facilitated Transshipments

We consider supplier‐facilitated transshipments for achieving supply chain coordination in a single supplier, multi‐retailer distribution system with non‐cooperative retailers. The previous transshipment literature has focused on coordination through retailer‐negotiated transshipments and thus does not consider the supplier's decision‐making. In contrast, in this study, we assume the supplier is an active participant in the system and we seek to understand how the supplier can facilitate the implementation of coordinating transshipments. We study a two‐period model with wholesale orders at the start of the first period and preventive transshipments performed at the start of the second period. Inspired by a supplier‐facilitated transshipment scheme observed in practice, we assume the supplier implements transshipments through a bi‐directional adjustment contract. Under this contract, each retailer can either buy additional inventory from, or sell back excess inventory to, the supplier. We show that coordination can be achieved through carefully designed contracts with state‐dependent adjustment prices and a wholesale price menu. We demonstrate that the supplier's role in facilitating coordinating transshipments is critical. In addition, we use our understanding of the coordinating contract form to derive some simpler and easier‐to‐implement heuristic contracts. We use a numerical study to demonstrate the value, to the supplier, of using the coordinating adjustment and wholesale prices, and to evaluate the heuristics’ performance.     

Supply Chain Sourcing Under Asymmetric Information

We study a supply chain with two suppliers competing over a contract to supply components to a manufacturer. One of the suppliers is a big company for whom the manufacturer's business constitutes a small part of his business. The other supplier is a small company for whom the manufacturer's business constitutes a large portion of his business. We analyze the problem from the perspective of the big supplier and address the following questions: What is the optimal contracting strategy that the big supplier should follow? How does the information about the small supplier's production cost affect the profits and contracting decision? How does the existence of the small supplier affect profits? By studying various information scenarios regarding the small supplier's and the manufacturer's production cost, we show, for example, that the big supplier benefits when the small supplier keeps its production cost private. We quantify the value of information for the big supplier and the manufacturer. We also quantify the cost (value) of the alternative‐sourcing option for the big supplier (the manufacturer). We determine when an alternative‐sourcing option has more impact on profits than information. We conclude with extensions and numerical examples to shed light on how system parameters affect this supply chain.     

不同货架空间分配顺序下农产品供应链优化问题研究

货架是超市和生鲜便利店的重要资源，不仅具有储存和展示农产品的功能，同时货架空间大小对农产品的销量具有重要影响。针对产品需求受货架空间与零售价格共同影响的两级农产品供应链，在考虑供应商主导和零售商主导的情况下，分别对零售商在销售季节来临前和来临后分配货架空间四种分散式农产品供应链的最优决策与利润进行了分析，并与一体化供应链的最优决策进行了比较。研究发现，不论是在供应商主导还是在零售商主导的农产品供应链中，零售商在销售季节来临前分配货架空间，相比在销售季节来临后分配货架空间，农产品的批发价格与零售价格更高，分配的货架空间更小，供应商和零售商均获得更少的利润，相应的农产品供应链整体利润更少。因此，零售商在销售季节来临后分配货架空间对农产品供应链更有利。相比一体化供应链，分散式供应链的零售价格更高，分配的货架空间更小，供应链整体利润小于一体化供应链的最优利润，本文给出了基于利润共享与成本共担的合同对分散式供应链进行协调。最后，通过数值算例研究了参数变化对最优决策和供应链利润的影响。     

On Optimal Expediting Policy for Supply Systems with Uncertain Lead‐Times

We examine the role of expediting in dealing with lead‐time uncertainties associated with global supply chains of “functional products” (high volume, low demand uncertainty goods). In our developed stylized model, a retailer sources from a supplier with uncertain lead‐time to meet his stable and known demand, and the supply lead‐time is composed of two random duration stages. At the completion time of the first stage, the retailer has the option to expedite a portion of the replenishment order via an alternative faster supply mode. We characterize the optimal expediting policy in terms of if and how much of the order to expedite and explore comparative statics on the optimal policy to better understand the effects of changes in the cost parameters and lead‐time properties. We also study how the expediting option affects the retailer's decisions on the replenishment order (time and size of order placement). We observe that with the expediting option the retailer places larger orders closer to the start of the selling season, thus having this option serve as a substitute for the safety lead‐time and allowing him to take increased advantages of economies of scale. Finally we extend the basic model by looking at correlated lead‐time stages and more than two random lead‐time stages.     

供应商保鲜努力的生鲜农产品双渠道供应链协调决策研究

在互联网迅猛发展的时代,生鲜农产品双渠道营销模式是供应商的最佳选择,如何发挥双渠道优势,实现渠道共赢是目前研究的热点。以供应商主导的双渠道供应链为研究对象,考虑新鲜度衰减且扰动需求和供应商保鲜努力,对比分析集中和分散决策模型,论证构建协调模型的必要性。从渠道合作和利润最大化的角度出发,设计两部定价契约、批发价协调契约和由成本分担与补偿策略构成的混合协调契约,三种契约均能在一定范围内有效实现供应链协调,提高各成员的利润。最后,对比分析所设计协调契约以认识其本质,并通过数值分析验证其有效性。     

Price promotions,operations cost,and profit in a two-stage supply chain

The phenomenon in which demand variability increases as one moves upstream in the supply chain has been often observed in practice. This so-called “bullwhip effect” often increases upstream operations costs, including inventory holding and transportation costs. Price variations are considered to be one of the primary causes of the bullwhip effect, and thus everyday low price (EDLP) strategies are commonly recommended to counter the negative impacts of the bullwhip effect. However, trade promotions continue to play an important role in the U.S. supermarket industry as well as other industries. This paper investigates this apparent inconsistency between the literature and practice by employing a deterministic, two-stage supply chain model composed of a single supplier and a single retailer. We demonstrate that even though the use of trade promotions can indeed increase a retailer's and supplier's operations costs, these costs may be more than offset by increased revenues, even in the absence of explicit coordination. That is, if the supplier judiciously applies a trade promotion strategy and the retailer passes some of this discount to its customers, then under certain conditions, the resulting supply chain profit can exceed that under an EDLP strategy. We provide a broad set of computational results that validate this conclusion and discuss the resulting managerial insights.