Optimal promotion planning—depth and frequency—for a two-stage supply chain under Markov switching demand

In considering the retailer–supplier supply chain, this paper analyzes how a retailer reasonably decides both the depth and frequency of the price discount promotion including or excluding a supplier’s inventory decision. Assuming that the promotion frequency used by the retailer is probabilistic, we model a promotion-inventory decision under an AR(1) demand with a Markov switching promotion regime. After obtaining the optimal promotion plan, our analysis also considers the behavior of the optimal promotion decision; the retailer’s price format selection, either an Every-Day-Low-Price policy (EDLP) or a Promotion policy (HiLo); and the impact of information sharing of promotion status on the system’s performance. Our results suggest that a retailer tends to overpromote if inventory cost is excluded in its promotion decision, that increasing the market share is a preferable action for both the retailer and the supplier, that total margin and price-elasticity play an important role in selecting the price format, and that the profitability for a supplier of sharing promotion information depends on the transition probabilities of the Markov switching regime.     

‘Too Little’ or ‘Too Late’: The timing of supply chain demand collaboration

This study examines the supply chain demand collaboration between a manufacturer and a retailer. We study how the timing of collaboration facilitates production decision of the manufacturer when the information exchanged in the collaboration is asymmetric. We investigate two collaboration mechanisms: ‘Too Little’ and ‘Too Late’, depending on the timing of information sharing between the manufacturer and the retailer. Our research results indicate that early collaboration as in the ‘Too Little’ mechanism leads to a stable production schedule, which decreases the need of production adjustment when production cost information becomes available; whereas a late collaboration as in the ‘Too Late’ mechanism enhances the flexibility of production adjustment when demand information warrants it. In addition, the asymmetric demand information confounds production decisions all the time; the manufacturer has to provide proper incentives to ensure truthful information sharing in collaboration. Information asymmetry might also reduce the difference in production decision between the ‘Too Little’ and ‘Too Late’ collaboration mechanisms. Numerical analysis is further conducted to demonstrate the performance implications of the collaboration mechanisms on the supply chain.     

Trade credit for supply chain coordination

Trade-credit is a seller’s short-term loan to the buyer, allowing the buyer to delay payment of an invoice. It has been the largest source of working capital for a majority of business-to-business firms in the United States. Numerous theories have been proposed to explain trade-credit, mainly from finance perspectives. It has also been an important issue in supply chain management. Surprisingly, most literature in supply chain management has examined the retailer’s stocking policies given a supplier’s trade-credit. This paper attempts to shed light on trade-credit from a supplier’s perspective, and presents it as a tool for supply chain coordination. Specifically, we explicitly assume firms’ financial needs for inventory. Following a Newsvendor framework, we assume that the supplier grants trade-credit and markdown allowance. Given the supplier’s offer, the retailer determines order quantity and the financing option for the inventory, either trade-credit or direct financing from a financial institution. Our result shows that the supplier’s markdown allowance alone cannot fully coordinate the supply chain if the retailer employs direct financing. Positive financing costs call for trade-credit in order to subsidize the retailer’s costs of inventory financing. Using trade-credit in addition to markdown allowance, the supplier fully coordinates the retailer’s decisions for the largest joint profit, and extracts a greater portion of the maximized joint profit.     

Selling to the “Newsvendor” with a forecast update: Analysis of a dual purchase contract

We consider a supply chain in which a manufacturer sells to a procure-to-stock retailer facing a newsvendor problem with a forecast update. Under a wholesale price contract, the retailer waits as long as she can and optimally places her order after observing the forecast update. We show that the retailer’s wait-and-decide strategy, induced by the wholesale price contract, hinders the manufacturer’s ability to (1) set the wholesale price and maximize his profit, (2) hedge against excess inventory risk, and (3) reduce his profit uncertainty. To mitigate the adverse effect of wholesale price contract, we propose the dual purchase contract, through which the manufacturer provides a discount for orders placed before the forecast update. We characterize how and when a dual purchase contract creates strict Pareto improvement over a wholesale price contract. To do so, we establish the retailer’s optimal ordering policy and the manufacturer’s optimal pricing and production policies. We show how the dual purchase contract reduces profit variability and how it can be used as a risk hedging tool for a risk averse manufacturer. Through a numerical study, we provide additional managerial insights and show, for example, that market uncertainty is a key factor that defines when the dual purchase contract provides strict Pareto improvement over the wholesale price contract.     

Sustainable SC through the complete reprocessing of end-of-life products by manufacturers: A traditional versus social responsibility company perspective

Every item produced, transported, used and discarded within a Supply Chain (SC) generates costs and creates an impact on the environment. The increase of forward flows as effects of market globalization and reverse flows due to legislation, warranty, recycling and disposal activities affect the ability of a modern SC to be economically and environmentally sustainable. In this context, the study considers an innovative sustainable closed loop SC problem. It first introduces a linear programming model that aims to minimize the total SC costs. Environmental sustainability is guaranteed by the complete reprocessing of an end-of-life product, the re-use of components, the disposal of unusable parts sent directly from the manufacturers, with a closed loop transportation system that maximizes transportation efficiency. Secondly, the authors consider the problem by means of a parametrical study, by analyzing the economical sustainability of the proposed CLSC model versus the classical Forward Supply Chain model (FWSC) from two perspectives: Case 1, the ‘traditional company perspective’, where the SC ends at the customers, and the disposal costs are not included in the SC, and Case 2, the ‘social responsibility company perspective’, where the disposal costs are considered within the SC. The relative impact of the different variables in the SC structure and the applicability of the proposed model, in terms of total costs, SC structure and social responsibility, are investigated thoroughly and the results are reported at the conclusion of the paper.     

Rationale of underwriters’ pricing conduct on competitive insurance market

Underwriters’ desire to show a good annual review is known to be a rationale of the aggressive pricing conduct. On the competitive insurance market, it impacts the global insurance processes and can lead to the competition-originated underwriting cycles. Applying Lundberg’s model of the annual probability mechanism of insurance, we model the influence of a price reduction on migration and consequently on the company’s annual expansion, revenue and solvency.     

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.     

Single-supplier/multiple-buyer supply chain coordination: Incorporating buyers’ expectations under vertical information sharing

We address the coordination problem in a single-supplier/multiple-buyer supply chain. The supplier wishes to coordinate the supply chain by offering quantity discounts. To obtain their complete cost information, the supplier exchanges his own cost parameters with buyers leading to vertical information sharing. The supplier thinks that the buyers, as they have access to supplier’s setup and holding cost information, may demand a portion of the anticipated coordination savings based on the partial information they hold about the cost structure of the entire supply chain. We model each buyer’s expectations based on her limited view of the entire supply chain which consists of herself and the supplier only. These expectations are then incorporated into the modeling of the supply chain, which results in a generalization of the traditional Stackelberg type models. We discuss alternative efficiency sharing mechanisms, and propose methods to design the associated discount schemes that take buyers’ expectations into account. In designing the discount schemes, we consider both price discriminatory and non-price discriminatory approaches. The study adds to the existing body of work by incorporating buyers’ expectations into a constrained Stackelberg structure, and by achieving coordination without forcing buyers to explicitly comply with the supplier’s replenishment period in choosing their order quantities. The numerical analysis of the coordination efficiency and allocation of the net savings of the proposed discount schemes shows that the supplier is still able to coordinate the supply chain with high efficiency levels, and retain a significant portion of the net savings.     

A note on supply chain coordination for joint determination of order quantity and reorder point using a credit option

Credit options and side payments are two methods suggested for achieving coordination in a two-echelon supply chain. We examine the credit option coordination mechanism introduced by Chaharsooghi and Heydari [Chaharsooghi, S., & Heydari, J. (2010). Supply chain coordination for the joint determination of order quantity and reorder point using credit option. European Journal of Operational Research, 204(1), 86–95]. This method assumes that the supplier’s opportunity costs are equal to the reduction in the buyer’s financial holding costs during the credit period. In this note, we show that Chaharsooghi and Heydari’s method is not applicable when buyer and supplier opportunity costs are not equal. We introduce an alternate per order rebate method that reduces supply chain costs to centralized management levels.     

“Bricks-and-mortar” vs. “clicks-and-mortar”: An equilibrium analysis

The Internet has provided traditional retailers a new means with which to serve customers. Consequently, many “bricks-and-mortar” retailers have transformed to “clicks-and-mortar” by incorporating Internet sales. Examples of companies making such a transition include Best Buy, Wal-Mart, Barnes & Noble, etc. Despite the increasing prevalence of this practice, several fundamental questions remain: (1) Does it pay off to go online? (2) Which is the equilibrium industry structure? (3) What is the implication of this business model for consumers? We study these issues in an oligopoly setting and show that clicks-and-mortar arises as the equilibrium channel structure. However, we find that this equilibrium does not necessarily imply higher profits for the firms: in some cases, rather, it emerges as a strategic necessity. Consumers are generally better off with clicks-and-mortar retailers. If firms align with pure e-tailers to reach the online market, we show that a prisoner’s dilemma-type equilibrium may arise.     

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.     

The influence of non-linear dependencies on the basis risk of industry loss warranties

Index-linked catastrophic loss instruments represent an alternative to traditional reinsurance to hedge against catastrophic losses. The use of these instruments comes with benefits, such as a reduction of moral hazard and higher transparency. However, at the same time, it introduces basis risk as a crucial key risk factor, since the index and the company’s losses are usually not fully dependent. The aim of this paper is to examine the impact of basis risk on an insurer’s solvency situation when an industry loss warranty contract is used for hedging. Since previous literature has consistently stressed the importance of a high degree of dependence between the company’s losses and the industry index, we extend previous studies by allowing for non-linear dependencies between relevant processes (high-risk and low-risk assets, insurance company’s loss and industry index). The analysis shows that both the type and degree of dependence play a considerable role with regard to basis risk and solvency capital requirements and that other factors, such as relevant contract parameters of index-linked catastrophic loss instruments, should not be neglected to obtain a comprehensive and holistic view of their effect upon risk reduction.     

A decision support for identifying crucial knowledge requiring capitalizing operation

Capitalizing on the company’s crucial knowledge is an important operation for company’s success. The first step in knowledge capitalizing is to identify the crucial knowledge for which capitalizing operation is required. The crucial knowledge identification is an ill-structured and multi-criteria problem. In this paper, the crucial knowledge identification problem is structured according to the well-known Simon’s decision making process. Then, a decision support system (DSS), called K-DSS, is developed to support this decision process. The main objectives of this paper are to introduce the crucial knowledge identification decision process, to present the conceptual and functional architectures of K-DSS and to illustrate its utility through a real-world case study conducted in an automobile company.     

Random yield supply chain with a yield dependent secondary market

This paper considers a simple supply chain with one supplier and one retailer where the supplier’s production is subject to random yield and the retailer faces uncertain demand. There exists a secondary market for acquiring or disposing products by the supplier. We study both the centralized and decentralized systems. In the decentralized system, a no risk sharing contract and a risk sharing minimum commitment contract are analyzed. The supply chain with the risk sharing contract is further analyzed with a constant secondary market price and a yield dependent secondary market price. We present both the supplier’s and the retailer’s optimal strategies and provide insights for managers when making decisions under random yield risk and demand uncertainty. We find that the secondary market generally has a positive impact on supply chain performance and the actual effect of random yield risk on the supply chain performance depends on cost parameters and supply chain contract settings. Under certain conditions, reducing yield randomness may weaken the double marginalization effect and improve the chain performance. From the numerical study, we also show that there exists an optimal commitment level for the supply chain.     

Decision dependent stochastic processes

Managers, typically, are unaware of the significant impact their decisions could have on the random mechanism driving a data generating process. Here, a new parametric Bayesian technique is introduced that would allow managers to obtain an estimate of the impact of their decisions on the stochastic process driving the data; this, in turn, should enhance a company’s overall decision-making capabilities. This general approach to modeling decision-dependency is carried out via an efficient Markov chain Monte Carlo method. A simulated example, and a real-life example, using historical maintenance and failure time data from a system at the South Texas Project Nuclear Operating Company, exemplifies the paper’s theoretical contributions. Conclusive evidence of decision dependence in the failure time distribution is reported, which in turn points to an optimal maintenance policy that results in potentially large financial savings to the Texas-based company.     

An uncooperative order model for items with trade credit,inventory-dependent demand and limited displayed-shelf space

This paper considers a two-echelon supply chain where a supplier sells a single product through a retailer, who faces an inventory-dependent demand. The supplier hopes to incentive the retailer to order more items by offering trade credit. The retailer places the ordered items on the display shelf (DS) with limited space and stocks the remaining items (if any) that exceed the shelf capacity in his/her backroom/warehouse (BW). From the supplier’s perspective, we focus mainly on under which conditions the supplier should offer trade credit and how he/she should design such trade credit policy and corresponding ordering policy to obtain much more benefits. From the retailer’s perspective, we discuss whether the retailer needs BW and exactly how many items need to be stocked in BW when the supplier offers trade credit. We formulate a “supplier-Stackelberg” game model, from which we obtain the conditions under which the presented simple trade credit policy not only increases the overall chain profit but also each member’s profit. We also show that the trade credit policy is always more beneficial to the retailer than to the supplier if it is offered.     

The impact of disaster on the strategic interaction between company and government

A company allocates a resource between safety effort and production. The government earns taxes on production. The disaster probability is modeled as a contest between the disaster magnitude and the two players’ safety efforts. The model illustrates that safety efforts are strategic substitutes and inverse U shaped in the disaster magnitude. The company’s safety effort increases, and the government’s safety effort decreases, in taxation. Taxation can ameliorate companies’ free riding on governments’ safety efforts. With sufficiently large production, the government prefers, and the company does not prefer, raising taxation above 0%. For the government, an upper limit usually exists above which taxation cannot be profitably increased. The model shows how both or no players exert safety efforts when the disaster magnitude is small and large respectively, and how they free ride on each other’s safety efforts when the disaster magnitude is intermediate. The company free rides when the unit production cost is low so that the large profits outweigh the negative impact of the disaster. With endogenized taxation determined by the government, the tax rate decreases in the disaster magnitude, the unit production cost, the government’s unit cost of safety effort, and how the company is negatively affected by the disaster. The tax rate increases in the company’s resource and how the government is negatively affected by the disaster. The tax rate is weakly U shaped in the company’s unit safety effort. The model is illustrated with numerical examples and with the oil spill disasters by BP in 2010 and by Exxon Valdez in 1989.     

Quality investment and price decision in a risk-averse supply chain

In this paper, we investigate quality investment and price decision of a make-to-order (MTO) supply chain with uncertain demand in international trade. Due to volatility of orders from buyers, the supplier and the manufacturer in the supply chain are subject to financial risk. In contrast to the general assumption that players in a supply chain are risk neutral in quality investment and price decision, we consider the risk-averse behavior of the players in three different supply chain strategies: Vertical Integration (VI), Manufacturer’s Stackelberg (MS) and Supplier’s Stackelberg (SS). The study shows that both supply chain strategy and risk-averse behavior have significant impacts on quality investment and pricing. Compared to a risk-neutral supply chain, a risk-averse supply chain has lower, same and higher quality of products in VI, MS and SS, respectively. Also, we derive the conditions under which the supply chain strategy is implemented in a decentralized setting. A numerical study is used to illustrate some related issues.     

Locating specialized service capacity in a multi-hospital network

Multi-hospital systems have become very common in today’s healthcare environment. However, there has been limited published research examining the opportunities and challenges of pooling specialized services to a subset of hospitals in the network. Therefore, this paper considers how hospital networks with multiple locations can leverage pooling benefits when deciding where to position specialized services, such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), transplants, or neonatal intensive care. Specifically, we develop an optimization model to determine how many and which of a hospital network’s hospitals should be set up to deliver a specialized service. Importantly, this model takes into account both financial considerations and patient service levels. Computational results illustrate the value of optimally pooling resources across a subset of hospitals in the network versus two alternate approaches: (1) delivering the service at all locations and requiring each site to handle its own demand, or (2) locating the service at one hospital that handles all network demand.     

Avoiding non-optimal management decisions by applying a three-person inspection game

An inspection game models a conflict situation between an inspector and an inspectee. The mathematical analysis aims to generate optimal behavior of the inspectee under the assumption that an undesirable action of the inspectee could otherwise be carried out strategically. In this paper the controller’s (inspector’s) particular job is to audit a manager’s (inspectee’s) decision and to submit a report to the company’s top managers for examination. Thus, a conflict as regards the choice of behavioral actions of the manager, the controller and the top management impends. Based on Fandel and Trockel (2011a) this modified inspection game is discussed here for the first time as a three-person game in the context of a manager’s faulty decision that will unnecessarily add to the company’s costs and that the top management understandably wishes to minimize. We will first examine the conditions under which a Nash equilibrium occurs in this three-person game in which poor management, poor monitoring and poor revision coincide. We will then examine the effects that the penalties and bonuses exert on the Nash equilibrium solution. We will find that penalties and bonuses can neutralize each other in their effects on the improved decision making by the manager and the controller.