供应商成本信息不对称下装配系统协同问题研究

本文研究的装配系统由两个供应商和一个制造商组成,其中一个供应商的成本信息为公共信息,另一个供应商的成本信息为其私有信息,制造商通过设计契约来揭示该私有信息。作为装配系统的主导者,制造商一方面以自身利润最大化为目标,另一方面希望通过系统协同来获得更多的利润。研究结果表明,制造商对两个供应商都采用批发价契约时,无法揭示供应商的私有信息;制造商对信息公开的供应商采用批发价契约,对拥有私有信息的供应商采用价格补贴契约时,可以揭示供应商的私有信息,但不能实现装配系统的整体协同;制造商对两个供应商都采用价格补贴契约时,在成功揭示供应商的私有信息的同时,也实现了装配系统的整体协同。数值分析结果表明,同制造商对两个供应商分别提供批发价契约和价格补贴契约时相比,制造商对两个供应商都提供价格补贴契约时,私有信息的揭示区间会变大,系统总利润和拥有私有信息的供应商的利润会增加,信息公开的供应商的利润会降低,制造商的利润可能增加也可能降低。     

Dynamic conformance and design quality in a supply chain: an assessment of contracts’ coordinating power

We consider a two-echelon supply chain involving one manufacturer and one supplier who collaborate on improving both design and conformance quality. Design quality is supposed to increase product desirability, and therefore market demand, while conformance quality should reduce the proportion of defective items, and therefore increase the manufacturer’s sales revenue. We investigate how the supply chain parties allocate effort between design and conformance quality under both cooperative and non-cooperative settings in an intertemporal framework. Furthermore, we evaluate wholesale price contracts and revenue-sharing contracts in terms of their performance and coordination power. We show that although a revenue-sharing contract enables the manufacturer to effectively involve the supplier in quality improvement, neither contract type allows for perfect coordination resulting in the quality that can be achieved by a cooperative supply chain. We thus suggest a reward-based extension to the revenue-sharing contract, to ensure system-wide optimal quality performance. Importantly, we find that the supplier would be better off adopting a reward-based revenue sharing contract and refusing a standard revenue-sharing contract, while the opposite would be true for the manufacturer.     

Coordination in a two-stage capacitated supply chain with multiple suppliers

The aim of this paper is to coordinate the inventory policies in a decentralized supply chain with stochastic demand by means of contracts. The system considered is a decentralized two-stage supply chain consisting of multiple independent suppliers and a manufacturer with limited production capacities. The suppliers operate on a make-to-stock basis and apply base stock policy to manage their inventories. On the other hand, the manufacturer employs a make-to-order strategy. Under the necessary assumptions, each supplier is modeled as an M/M/1 make-to-stock queue; and the manufacturer is modeled as a GI/M/1 queue after deriving an approximate distribution for the interarrival times of the manufacturer. Once the supply chain is modeled as a queuing system, centralized and decentralized models are developed. Comparison of the optimal solutions to these models reveals that the supply chain needs coordination. Three different transfer payment contracts are examined in this paper. These are the backorder and holding cost subsidy contracts, the transfer payment contract based on Pareto improvement, and the cost sharing contract. Each contract is evaluated according to its coordination ability and whether it is Pareto improving or not. The results indicate that all three contracts can coordinate the supply chain. However, when the Pareto improvement is taken into account, the cost sharing contract seems to be the one that will be preferred by all parties.     

Supply contracting and process innovation in a dynamic supply chain with information asymmetry

We investigate the process innovation and contracting decisions of a dynamic supply chain consisting of a supplier and a manufacturer, with the manufacturer possessing private information about her efficiency of process innovation. To overcome the potential adverse selection problem due to the asymmetric information, the supplier designs a menu of supply contracts that stipulates both the wholesale price and the purchasing quantity. We find that under information asymmetry, the supplier will optimally set a higher wholesale price but a lower purchasing quantity for the manufacturer with high innovation efficiency than that for the manufacturer with low innovation efficiency. As a consequence, the manufacturer with high innovation efficiency will significantly underinvest in innovation due to information asymmetry in addition to the impact of the double marginalization effect. Moreover, although a longer contract period tends to better motivate innovation, it can also magnify the influences of adverse selection on supply chain contracting, leading to a higher wholesale price for the manufacturer with high innovation efficiency.     

Optimizing product service system by franchise fee contracts under information asymmetry

This paper studies the problem of how to effectively provide product service system (PSS) in a service-oriented manufacturing supply chain under asymmetric private demand information. The PSS in the supply chain is operated heterogeneously and complementarily, in which the manufacturer provides the product while the retailer who possesses private demand information is responsible for adding the necessary value-added service on the basic product. We address the issue of how different contracts affect the decisions and profitability of the supply chain members. Three types of contracts are developed to help supply chain partners to make decisions and enhance the supply chain’s efficiency. The first is the franchise fee (FF) contract, under which the manufacturer provides a two-part tariff contract (wholesale price and franchise fee) to influence the retailer’s decision and to detect her private demand information. The second is the franchise fee with service requirement (FFS) contract, under which the manufacturer specifies the service level required in addition to the two-part tariff contract terms. The third is the franchise fee with centralized service requirement (FFCS) contract, which is similar to the FFS contract but that the service level specified by the manufacturer is the system optimal solution. Our analytical results show that all three contracts enable the manufacturer to detect the retailer’s private demand information, with the FFCS contract achieving the greatest channel profit. Finally, numerical examples are presented, and sensitivity analysis of service level and profit are conducted to compare the performance of the three contracts under different settings. The paper provides managerial guidelines for the manufacturer in contract offering under different conditions.     

Buyer-supplier currency exchange rate flexibility contracts in global supply chains

This paper analyzes a decentralized global supply chain under a newsvendor setting, where a supplier delivers a certain quantity of a single product to a buyer in accordance with the terms of a mutually agreed upon contract. This contract is signed prior to the delivery of the product and subsequent payment, thus, exposing the supply chain to the risk of currency exchange rate fluctuations. We propose two types of currency exchange rate flexibility contracts to explore the characteristics of exchange rate risk mitigation policies for the buyer and the supplier. Furthermore, we investigate the effects of the contract structures on the optimal order quantity, as well as the expected profits of both supply chain members. Our results show that the optimal order quantity of the buyer decreases when the wholesale price is uncertain due to exchange rate volatility. Also, both our proposed contracts tend to improve the expected profits of both the buyer and the supplier, when the payment is made in the supplier’s currency, indicating the desirability of adopting such contractual agreements from the perspective of both parties. On the other hand, when the payment is made in the buyer’s currency, our suggested contracts do not yield such win-win scenarios. Finally, we examine the effectiveness of availing the services of a local vendor, which is capable of satisfying any demand in excess of the quantity ordered from the foreign source with short notice, in order to mitigate the risks associated with an overseas order.     

Long-term and penalty contracts in a two-stage supply chain with stochastic demand

Recent applications of game-theoretic analysis to supply chain efficiency have focused on constructs between a buyer (the retailer or manufacturer) and a seller (the supplier) in successive stages of a supply chain. If demand for the final product is stochastic then the supplier has an incentive to keep its capacity relatively low to avoid creating unneeded capacity. The manufacturer, on the other hand, prefers the supplier’s capacity to be high to ensure that the final demand is satisfied. The manufacturer therefore constructs a contract to induce the supplier to increase its production capacity. Most research examines contracting when final demand is realized after the manufacturer places its order to the supplier. However, if final demand is realized before the manufacturer places its order to the supplier, these types of contracts can be ineffective. This paper examines two contracts under the latter timing scenario: long-term contracts in which the business relationship is repeated, and penalty contracts in which the supplier is penalized for too little capacity. Results indicate long-term contracts increase the profit potential of the supply chain. Furthermore, the penalty contracts can ensure that the supplier chooses a capacity level such that the full profit potential is achieved.     

Contract and product quality in platform selling

More and more e-tailers (platforms) are allowing manufacturers direct access to customers. Two common contracts are offered by platforms to manufacturers: the revenue sharing contract where a platform appropriates a portion of the manufacturer’s revenue, and the fixed fee contract where a platform charges a fixed rent for each sale. Using an analytical model, this paper studies the interrelationship between a platform’s contract choice and a manufacturer’s product quality decision. We find that if product quality is exogenously given, the platform will always adopt the revenue sharing contract. If the manufacturer endogenously decides the quality, however, the platform’s contract choice may be changed. This is because the revenue sharing contract, compared to fixed fee, leads to a lower selling price of the manufacturer, whereas the fixed fee contract can motivate a higher quality than does revenue sharing. As a result, a large (small) market heterogeneity induces the platform to adopt the revenue sharing (fixed fee) contract. We also extend the model to several directions, finding that longer product line, manufacturer competition, lower marginal production cost, and higher platform cost all tend to induce the platform to put forward a fixed fee contract; while if quality decision is less flexible than contract decision, the platform is more ready to embrace revenue sharing. Besides, when there are two platforms competing for the same market, they should differentiate their contract choices so as to mitigate competition.     

Supply chains in the presence of store brands

Increased competition from store brands is forcing manufacturers to re-evaluate their strategies in regard to pricing and contracting with trade intermediaries. We analyze a supply chain in which a retailer accepts (with the appropriate contractual agreements) a national brand for resale and then determines whether to introduce a store brand, how to price the store brand, and what quantities of the product(s) to order. We show that when the national brand’s cost per unit quality (CPUQ) is larger than the store brand’s CPUQ, then the retailer seeks to introduce the store brand (SB) and the national brand (NB) manufacturer/supplier is unable to deter him from doing so. We find that the efficiency loss in the decentralized supply chain becomes smaller when a store brand is introduced. Recognizing the inadequacy of standard contracts in coordinating this supply chain, we propose a simple minimum order quantity contract that can coordinate this supply chain.     

Monotonicity properties of wholesale price contracts

This paper contributes to the supply chain contracts literature in economics and operations by performing qualitative sensitivity analysis of a wholesale price contract in a two-echelon supply chain setting. Order-theory tools are used to derive sufficient conditions for monotonicity of contract parameters.The upstream supplier is modeled as a Stackelberg leader. The supplier is assumed to have complete information about the costs and revenue function of the downstream retailer. It is shown that an equilibrium wholesale price weakly increases with an increase in the supplier production cost rate, but it may increase or decrease with an increase in the retailer cost rate. As either the supplier production cost or the retailer cost increases, the supplier profit decreases weakly. Additional sensitivity analysis is performed assuming certain properties of the retailer revenue function.Several well-known results in the supply chain contracting literature can be considered as special cases of the more general theorems developed here. In particular, this paper reexamines the analysis of a newsvendor supply chain problem by Lariviere and Porteus [Lariviere, M.A., Porteus, E.L., 2001. Selling to the newsvendor: An analysis of price-only contracts. Manufacturing & Service Operations Management 3, 293–305]. This paper generalizes and extends their work, by establishing properties of the newsvendor demand distribution that guarantee monotonicity of the contract parameters, without requiring a unique contract solution.     

Optimal shared-savings contracts in supply chains: Linear contracts and double moral hazard

In many supply chains consumption of indirect materials, sold by a supplier to a customer for use in her production process, can be reduced by efforts exerted by either party. Since traditional supply contracts provide no incentive for the supplier to exert such effort, shared-savings contracts have been proposed as a way to improve incentives in the channel, leading to more efficient effort choices by the two parties. Such shared-savings contracts typically combine a fixed service fee with a variable component based on consumption volume. We formalize this situation using the double moral hazard framework, in which both parties decide how much effort to exert by trading off the cost of their effort against the benefits that they will obtain from reduced consumption. We also extend the double moral hazard framework to analyze a broader class of cost-of-effort functions than considered so far, including the linear cost-of-effort functions commonly found in practice. We show that the supplier can still always induce the optimal second-best equilibrium with a linear shared-savings contract. Under this broader class of functions, however, the behavior of the optimal contract as a function of the problem parameters becomes more complex. We illustrate how small changes in the problem parameters can turn profits from being a well-behaved to a poorly-behaved function of the contract, and provide some theoretical characterization of this phenomenon. The practical significance of this is that simple (linear) contracts are sufficient in many double moral hazard contexts, even for the broader class of functions we consider, but care must be taken in selecting the optimal contract parameters.     

Coordination of cooperative cost-reduction efforts in a supply chain partnership

We study cooperative cost reduction in a decentralized supply chain with a single manufacturer and multiple suppliers. The manufacturer assembles components that are procured from the suppliers to produce a final product. Both the manufacturer and the suppliers invest in reducing the unit production costs of the components. We see that neither of the two well-known conventional contracts, the wholesale price contract and the cost-plus pricing contract, generally coordinates the supply chain, i.e., under both of these types of contract, the individual optimal cost-reduction efforts of players deviate from the centralized system-optimal solution. However, this result is not surprising because these contracts encourage either only the manufacturer or only the suppliers alone to invest in cost reduction.     

外包策略下的三级供应链系统协调问题研究

由于存在着激烈的商业竞争,供需匹配成为供应链追求高绩效的关键.本文在制造商采取产能外包的策略下,引入二次采购契约研究制造商和销售商之间的契约订货问题.研究表明:1)供应链上存在一个核心企业来主导供应链契约的制定;2)本文设计的二次采购契约机制对分散式供应链的协调是有效的;3)制造商通过产能外包解决由于销售商的二次采购造成的缺货,可以使其更好地满足销售商的产品需求,进而提高供应链整体收益.最后,通过算例对研究结果作进一步说明.     

政府补贴下供应链合作减排的微分博弈

借助微分博弈理论,研究政府补贴下由一个供应商和一个制造商组成的供应链长期合作减排的动态协调问题。在产品需求受减排量的影响下,构建了集中式和分散式微分博弈模型,并设计了成本分担契约协调供应链。结合算例对参数进行灵敏度分析,研究发现:政府补贴对企业减排起到有效的激励作用并且有助于供应链实现协调;成本分担契约的引入可提高供应商和制造商的减排努力水平、产品减排量及需求量,并实现了供应链协调;随着供应商、制造商减排成本系数以及减排量自衰减率的增大,引入契约后产品减排量呈下降趋势;相反,随着产品减排量对减排努力水平的敏感性以及消费者低碳意识的增强,产品减排量呈上升趋势。     

供应链中的生产能力投资风险分配

在供应链中,每个管理者都会面临各种各样的供应和需求不确定性.这些不确定性会造成生产能力的过剩或不足,从而导致很大的利益损失,但是未必每个公司都会面临生产能力投资风险.针对一个单生产商单零售商系统,本文分析了三种不同的合同设计（推进式批发价合同,拉动式批发价合同和期权合同）对生产商和零售商的利润和生产能力投资风险的影响,推进式批发价合同和拉动式批发价均不能协调供应链,故我们找到其帕累托集;而对于期权合同,它能够协调整个供应链并且整合推进式和拉动式两种批发价合同使得生产商和零售商共同承担生产能力投资风险.在分析的过程中,我们将结果与已有的结果进行了比较,指出了其异同之处.     

基于契约和关系治理的供应链质量控制机制设计

本文考虑制造商和供应商共同努力改进产品质量的情况,研究在一个制造商处于领导地位的二级供应链中,如何通过有效的治理机制设计,提高产品质量水平,协调供应链。文章以理想的协同情况为基准,分析了两种治理机制下的质量努力程度,比较了正式契约治理与契约和关系混合治理对供应链效率的影响。结果表明,关系和契约混合治理在有效范围内能够将制造商和供应商紧密地联系起来,通过共同的质量努力获得比正式契约治理下更大的利润,实现供应链协调。     

A spatiotemporal Data Envelopment Analysis (S-T DEA) approach: the need to assess evolving units

We consider a two-stage supply chain with one supplier and one manufacturer. The manufacturer faces a Poisson demand process where the arrival rate depends on the selling price, the announced delivery time, and the delivery reliability defined as the probability of satisfying the announced delivery time. Such a demand model generalizes the works in the literature by simultaneously considering the above three demand sensitivity factors. The main purpose of this paper is to study the equilibrium decisions in the supply chain with an all-unit quantity discount contract. We consider four scenarios regarding whether the leadtime standard, the delivery reliability standard, and the manufacturer’s capacity are endogenous, and whether the manufacturer’s production cost is its private information. We find that an all-unit quantity discount scheme can coordinate the supply chain for most cases. Managerial insights are observed regarding the impact of the three demand sensitivity factors. For example, the breakpoint in an optimal quantity discount contract always increases with the delivery reliability sensitivity under an exogenous delivery reliability, but may decrease under an endogenous delivery reliability; with asymmetric information, a higher variance of the manufacturer’s unit production costs leads to a lower unit wholesale price for the low-cost manufacturer.     

First- and second-price sealed-bid auctions applied to push and pull supply contracts

We investigate a newsvendor-type retailer sourcing problem under demand uncertainty who has the option to source from multiple suppliers. The suppliers’ manufacturing costs are private information. A widely used mechanism to find the least costly supplier under asymmetric information is to use a sealed-bid reverse auction. We compare the combinations of different simple auction formats (first- and second-price) and risk sharing supply contracts (push and pull) under full contract compliance, both for risk-neutral and risk-averse retailer and suppliers. We show the superiority of a first-price push auction for a risk-neutral retailer. However, only the pull contracts lead to supply chain coordination. If the retailer is sufficiently risk-averse, the pull is preferred over the push contract. If suppliers are risk-averse, the first-price push auction remains the choice for the retailer. Numerical examples illustrate the allocation of benefits between the retailer and the (winning) supplier for different number of bidders, demand uncertainty, cost uncertainty, and degree of risk-aversion.     

An incentive model for closed-loop supply chain under the EPR law

Motivated by the collection outsourcing phenomena under Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR), this paper studies a contract design problem for a manufacturer who consigns the used product collection to a collector, while the manufacturer only has incomplete information on the collector's cost. On the basis of the incentive theory, optimal contracts are developed to minimize the cost and satisfy the collection constraints prescribed by EPR. Properties of the contract parameters are derived, and issues such as information rent and information value are also explored. The impacts of EPR are analysed by comparing whether or not EPR law is implemented, and more managerial insights are further obtained through numerical examples.     

Consignment contracts with retail competition

Consignment contracts have been widely employed in many industries. Under such contracts, items are sold at a retailer’s but the supplier retains the full ownership of the inventory until purchased by consumers; the supplier collects payment from the retailer based on actual units sold. We investigate how competition among retailers influences the supply chain decisions and profits under different consignment arrangements, namely a consignment price contract and a consignment contract with revenue share. First, we investigate how these two consignment contracts and a price only contract compare from the perspective of each supply chain partner. We find that the retailers benefit more from a consignment price contract than from a consignment contract with revenue share or a price only contract, regardless of the level of retailer differentiation. The supplier’s most beneficial contact, however, critically depends upon the level of retailer differentiation: a consignment contract with revenue share is preferable for the supplier if retailer differentiation is strong; otherwise a consignment price contract is preferable. Second, we study how retailer differentiation affects the profits of all supply chain partners. We find that less retailer differentiation improves the supplier’s profit for both types of consignment contract. Moreover, less retailer differentiation improves profits of the retailers in a consignment price contract, but not necessarily in a consignment contract with revenue share.