Qualifying for a government’s scrappage program to stimulate consumers’ trade-in transactions? Analysis of an automobile supply chain involving a manufacturer and a retailer

We investigate an automobile supply chain where a manufacturer and a retailer serve a market with a fuel-efficient automobile under a scrappage program by the government. The program awards a subsidy to each consumer who trades in his or her used automobile with a new fuel-efficient automobile, if the manufacturer’s suggested retail price (MSRP) for the new one does not exceed a cutoff level. We derive the conditions assuring that the manufacturer has an incentive to qualify for the program, and find that when the cutoff level is low, the manufacturer may be unwilling to qualify for the program even if the subsidy is high. We also show that when the manufacturer qualifies for the program, increasing the MSRP cutoff level would raise the manufacturer’s expected profit but may decrease the expected sales. A moderate cutoff level can maximize the effectiveness of the program in stimulating the sales of fuel-efficient automobiles, whereas a sufficiently high cutoff level can result in the largest profit for the manufacturer. The retailer’s profit always increases when the manufacturer chooses to qualify for the program. Furthermore, we compute the government’s optimal MSRP cutoff level and subsidy for a given sales target, and find that as the program budget increases, the government should raise the subsidy but reduce the MSRP cutoff level to maximize sales.     

Incentivizing the adoption of electric vehicles under subsidy schemes: A duopoly analysis

We analyze the competition between an electric vehicle (EV) manufacturer and an internal combustion vehicle manufacturer, under a government's subsidy scheme that provides a per-unit subsidy to the EV manufacturer or a price discount subsidy to EV consumers. The government should adopt the per-unit subsidy scheme, because, compared to the price-discount scheme, the government under the per-unit scheme can achieve the same EV sales and social welfare but pay for a smaller total subsidy.     

Demand disruption and coordination of the supply chain with a dominant retailer

This paper develops two coordination models of a supply chain consisting of one manufacturer, one dominant retailer and multiple fringe retailers to investigate how to coordinate the supply chain after demand disruption. We consider two coordination schedules, linear quantity discount schedule and Groves wholesale price schedule. We find that, under the linear quantity discount schedule, the manufacturer only needs to adjust the maximum variable wholesale price after demand disruption. For each case of the disrupted amount of demand, the higher the market share of the dominant retailer, the lower its average wholesale price and the subsidy will be under the linear quantity discount schedule, while the higher its fraction of the supply chain’s profit will be under Groves wholesale price schedule. When the increased amount of demand is very large and production cost is sufficiently low, linear quantity discount schedule is better for the manufacturer. However, when the production cost is sufficiently large, Groves wholesale price schedule is always better. We also find that the disrupted amount of demand largely affects the allocation of the supply chain’s profit.     

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.     

The role of retailer’s performance in optimal wholesale price discount policies

The main goal of this paper is to model the effects of wholesale price control on manufacturer’s profit, taking explicitly into account the retailer’s sales motivation and performance. We consider a stylized distribution channel where a manufacturer sells a single kind of good to a single retailer. Wholesale price discounts are assumed to increase the retailer’s motivation thus improving sales. We study the manufacturer’s profit maximization problem as an optimal control model where the manufacturer’s control is the discount on wholesale price and retailer’s motivation is one of the state variables. In particular in the paper we prove that an increasing discount policy is optimal for the manufacturer when the retailer is not efficient while efficient retailers may require to decrease the trade discounts at the end of the selling period. Computational experiments point out how the discount on wholesale price passed by the retailer to the market (pass-through) influences the optimal profit of the manufacturer.     

An oligopoly model of dynamic advertising competition

An oligopoly model is presented that allows the determination of feedback Nash equilibrium advertising strategies for an oligopoly. Analyses of symmetric and asymmetric oligopolies with the model show that unit contribution and advertising effectiveness have positive effects on a competitor’s own advertising and steady-state sales, while discount rate and decay rate have negative effects. An asymmetric analysis further shows that unit contribution and advertising effectiveness affect positively, and discount rate and decay rate negatively, a competitor’s rivals’ advertising, but have effects in opposite directions regarding rivals’ steady-state sales. The symmetric and asymmetric analyses also show that steady-state sales per competitor decline with the number of competitors in the oligopoly, while total oligopoly steady-state sales increase. The model is applied empirically to the triopolistic competition involving Anheuser-Busch, SABMiller, and Molson Coors in the beer industry.     

Sales effort free riding and coordination with price match and channel rebate

This paper studies sales effort coordination for a supply chain with one manufacturer and two retail channels, where an online retailer offers a lower price and free-rides a brick-and-mortar retailer’s sales effort. The free riding effect reduces brick-and-mortar retailer’s desired effort level, and thus hurts the manufacturer’s profit and the overall supply chain performance. To achieve sales effort coordination, we designed a contract with price match and selective compensation rebate. We also examined other contracts, including the target rebate contract and the wholesale price discount contract, both with price match. The numerical analysis shows that the selective rebate outperforms other contracts in coordinating the brick-and-mortar retailer’s sales effort and improving supply chain efficiency.     

Ship-to-order supplies: Contract breachability and the impact of a manufacturer-owned direct channel

We address the issue of contract breachability in a supply chain involving a retailer and a manufacturer operating under ship-to-order contract terms and stochastic demands. The manufacturer is required to fulfill the retailer’s demands on a continuous basis with little or no advance notice. The issue in such an environment is whether the retailer can “naively” assume that she will get a very high fill rate from the manufacturer and therefore has no need for contract penalties in case the manufacturer’s inventory falls short. We suggest a stochastic calculus framework to study the problem and derive a condition when the retailer’s naïve assumption is justified since the probability of stock-outs of the manufacturer is negligible. That is, the ship-to-order contract will not be breached and the fill rate will be more than a predetermined threshold. Furthermore we find that although the manufacturer-owned direct channel generates more revenue and may reduce the volatility of both inventory and production orders, the ratio between expected direct channel and retail sales affects the benefits.     

Product variety and channel structure strategy for a retailer-Stackelberg supply chain

Motivated by the observations that the direct sales channel is increasingly used for customized products and that retailers wield leadership, we develop in this paper a retailer-Stackelberg pricing model to investigate the product variety and channel structure strategies of manufacturer in a circular spatial market. To avoid channel conflict, we consider the commonly observed case where the indirect channel sells standard products whereas the direct channel offers custom products. Our analytical results indicate that if the reservation price in the indirect channel is sufficiently low, adding the direct channel raises the unit wholesale price and retail price in the indirect channel due to customization in the direct channel. Despite the fact that dual channels for the retailer may dominate the single indirect channel, we find that the motivation for the manufacturer to use dual channels decreases with the unit production cost, while increases with (i) the marginal cost of variety, (ii) the retailer’s marginal selling cost, and (iii) the customer’s fit cost. Interestingly, our equilibrium analysis demonstrates that it is more likely for the manufacturer to use dual channels under the retailer Stackelberg channel leadership scenario than under the manufacturer Stackelberg scenario if offering a greater variety is very expensive. When offering a greater variety is inexpensive, the decentralization of the indirect channel may invert the manufacturer’s channel structure decision. Furthermore, endogenization of product variety will also invert the channel structure decision if the standard product’s reservation price is sufficiently low.     

Make-or-buy service capacity decision in a supply chain providing after-sales service

We consider a supply chain comprising a manufacturer and a retailer. The manufacturer supplies a product to the retailer, while the retailer sells the product bundled with after-sales service to consumers in a fully competitive market. The sales volume is affected by the retailer’s service-level commitment. The retailer can build service capacity in-house at a deterministic price before service demand is realized, or buy the service from an outsourcing market at an uncertain price after service demand realization. We find that the outsourcing market encourages the retailer to make a higher level of service commitment, while prompting the manufacturer to reduce the wholesale price, resulting in more demand realization. We analyze how the expected cost of the service in the outsourcing market and the retailer’s risk attitude affect the decisions of both parties. We derive the conditions under which the retailer is willing to build service capacity in-house and under which it will buy the service from the outsourcing market. Moreover, we find that the manufacturer’s sharing with the retailer the cost to build service capacity improves the profits of both parties.     

Pricing and advertisement in a manufacturer–retailer supply chain

We use a game theoretical approach to study pricing and advertisement decisions in a manufacturer–retailer supply chain when price discounts are offered by both the manufacturer and retailer. When the manufacturer is the leader of the game, we obtained Stackelberg equilibrium with manufacturer’s local allowance, national brand name investment, manufacturer’s preferred price discount, retailer’s price discount, and local advertising expense. For the special case of two-stage equilibrium when the manufacturer’s price discount is exogenous, we found that the retailer is willing to increase local advertising expense if the manufacturer increases local advertising allowance and provides deeper price discount, or if the manufacturer decreases its brand name investment. When both the manufacturer and retailer have power, Nash equilibrium in a competition game is obtained. The comparison between the Nash equilibrium and Stackelberg equilibrium shows that the manufacturer always prefers Stackelberg equilibrium, but there is no definitive conclusion for the retailer. The bargaining power can be used to determine the profit sharing between the manufacturer and the retailer. Once the profit sharing is determined, we suggest a simple contract to help the manufacturer and retailer obtain their desired profit sharing.     

外包制造下政府补贴对低碳供应链影响分析

为分析外包制造下,政府补贴对低碳供应链竞争的影响,基于低碳产品外包制造,构建一个制造商、一个外包制造商和一个销售商组成的博弈模型。基于此模型,对比分析政府三种补贴策略对两种产品市场竞争机理的影响。研究得到:政府补贴给制造商或销售商时,单位委托制造价格要高于补贴给外包制造商时,也即,当政府采取补贴策略且不补贴给外包制造商时,外包制造商会通过增加单位委托制造价格转移政府补贴;政府补贴策略对单位普通产品批发价格和零售价格无影响,但政府补贴策略会减少普通产品销售量,增加低碳产品销售量;政府补贴虽然减少普通产品收益,但政府补贴增加低碳产品收益,且低碳产品增加收益大于普通产品减少收益,也即政府补贴增加制造商和销售商的利润;政府补贴策略减少两种产品对环境造成的影响,增加消费者剩余和社会剩余。     

A model of R&D valuation and the design of research incentives

We develop a real options model of R&D valuation that takes into account the uncertainty in the quality (or efficacy) of the research output, the time and cost to completion, and the market demand for the R&D output. The model is then applied to study the problem of pharmaceutical under-investment in R&D for vaccines to treat diseases affecting the developing regions of the world. To address this issue, world organizations and private foundations are willing to sponsor vaccine R&D, but there is no consensus on how to administer the sponsorship effectively. Different research incentive contracts are examined using our valuation model. Their effectiveness is measured in the following five dimensions: expected cost to the sponsor, probability of development success, consumer surplus generated, expected number of successful vaccinations and expected cost per person successfully vaccinated. We find that, in general, purchase commitment plans (pull subsidies) are more effective than cost subsidy plans (push subsidies). Moreover, we find that a hybrid subsidy plan constructed from a purchase commitment combined with a sponsor research cost-sharing subsidy is the most effective.     

A model of R&D valuation and the design of research incentives

We develop a real options model of R&D valuation that takes into account the uncertainty in the quality (or efficacy) of the research output, the time and cost to completion, and the market demand for the R&D output. The model is then applied to study the problem of pharmaceutical under-investment in R&D for vaccines to treat diseases affecting the developing regions of the world. To address this issue, world organizations and private foundations are willing to sponsor vaccine R&D, but there is no consensus on how to administer the sponsorship effectively. Different research incentive contracts are examined using our valuation model. Their effectiveness is measured in the following five dimensions: expected cost to the sponsor, probability of development success, consumer surplus generated, expected number of successful vaccinations and expected cost per person successfully vaccinated. We find that, in general, purchase commitment plans (pull subsidies) are more effective than cost subsidy plans (push subsidies). Moreover, we find that a hybrid subsidy plan constructed from a purchase commitment combined with a sponsor research cost-sharing subsidy is the most effective.     

Quality improvement vs. advertising support: Which strategy works better for a manufacturer?

We consider a marketing channel with a single manufacturer and a single retailer, where both advertising and quality improvement contribute to the build-up of goodwill. In a non-coop scenario, the retailer controls the advertising efforts while the manufacturer controls the quality improvements and wholesale price. Although improving quality positively contributes to goodwill, it also increases the production cost, thereby reducing the manufacturer’s profit. In a coop scenario, the manufacturer supports the retailer’s advertising while decreasing his investments in quality. We investigate the conditions under which a coop program is beneficial when such a trade-off occurs. Our results demonstrate that only when advertising significantly contributes to goodwill the manufacturer has an incentive to cooperate and a coop program turns out to be Pareto-improving. Conversely, the retailer is always better off with a coop program. Moreover, the channel is operational- and marketing-driven when quality effectiveness is high independent of advertising effectiveness or when both quality and advertising effectiveness are large. In all other cases, the channel is marketing-driven.     

The implications of postponement on contract design and channel performance

We analyze a supply chain consisting of one manufacturer and one retailer under consignment sales with a revenue sharing contract. The manufacturer produces before, but charges price to sell the products through the retailer after the demand curve is revealed. The retailer deducts a fraction from the selling price for each unit sold and remits the balance to manufacturer. We refer to the capability whereby firms delay price decision and make sales in response to actual market condition as postponement. We find that, when market demand admits a multiplicative structure, the revenue share and allocation of channel profit between the firms when they have postponement capability are similar to when they do not have such capability. Postponement improves the profits of individual firms. Such an effect is more phenomenal in the centralized system than in decentralized system, and when the market demand is more sensitive to price changes. However, it causes the profit loss, defined as the percentage deviation of channel profit in the decentralized system relative to the centralized system, to worsen, and the gap widens with retailer’s sales cost. When the demand has an additive structure, while the roles of postponement on firms’ decisions differ slightly from those under the multiplicative structure, the structure of the strategic interactions between firms and relative channel performance are not significantly altered.     

一种带有生产费用扰动的供应链协调问题

本文研究了一个生产两个竞争零售商的供应链在生产费用发生扰动下的协调问题．生产费用发生扰动后，零售商的投资额与生产商的生产数量都会和原计划不同．研究发现批发价加投资补贴率的合同可以协调扰动后的供应链，通过调整批发价和补贴率，可使供应链总的利润在生产商与两个零售商之间分配，并用数值模拟分析了所得结果的合理性．     

Wholesale price rebate vs. capacity expansion: The optimal strategy for seasonal products in a supply chain

We consider a supply chain in which one manufacturer sells a seasonal product to the end market through a retailer. Faced with uncertain market demand and limited capacity, the manufacturer can maximize its profits by adopting one of two strategies, namely, wholesale price rebate or capacity expansion. In the former, the manufacturer provides the retailer with a discount for accepting early delivery in an earlier period. In the latter, the production capacity of the manufacturer in the second period can be raised so that production is delayed until in the period close to the selling season to avoid holding costs. Our research shows that the best strategy for the manufacturer is determined by three driving forces: the unit cost of holding inventory for the manufacturer, the unit cost of holding inventory for the retailer, and the unit cost of capacity expansion. When the single period capacity is low, adopting the capacity expansion strategy dominates as both parties can improve their profits compared to the wholesale price rebate strategy. When the single period capacity is high, on the other hand, the equilibrium outcome is the wholesale price rebate strategy.     

Supply chain coordination through integration of innovation effort and advertising support

This study integrates firms’ innovation and advertising decisions in a two-echelon supply chain, where a monopoly manufacturer sells products to ultimate consumers through an autonomous retailer. Considering that both innovation and advertising contribute to the product demand, we first investigate the optimal equilibriums of channel members under two different game structures: the non-cooperative and cooperative. In the non-cooperative structure, the manufacturer controls the innovation effort and wholesale price while the retailer controls the advertising rate and retail pricing. In the cooperative structure, the manufacturer agrees to share part of retailer’s advertising expenditure. We find that both the optimal operation and marketing decisions are sensitive to effects of innovation and advertising on demand as well as the manufacturer’s cost reduction coefficient due to innovation. Further, we find that the manufacturer always prefers cooperation. Meanwhile, only when the firms’ investments significantly contribute to the market mechanism, does the retailer have incentive to implement a cooperative program. In addition, we further propose a new two-way subsidy policy to coordinate channel members’ business functions.     

不公平厌恶影响下的零售商销售努力自组织演化

构建了制造商通过销售回馈与惩罚契约来对具有不公平厌恶心理偏好的零售商群体的销售努力进行激励的计算实验模型,研究了零售商的不公平厌恶心理偏好对激励效果产生的影响。实验结果表明:零售商的不公平厌恶心理会对激励效果产生负面的影响;制造商设定的销售目标越高,不公平厌恶心理的负面影响就越大;当某零售商的销售量一旦低于目标销售量而遭受惩罚时,其会导致该零售商加剧不公平感知从而降低销售努力水平的路径依赖,导致制造商利润下降的主要原因是被惩罚零售商群体为其所带来的渠道利润降低;制造商在激励过程中应该更加重视被惩罚者的不公平厌恶心理。