Our work, comprising three essays, examines supply chain agent performance in a variety of decentralized systems under both stochastic and deterministic customer demand. In the first two essays, we develop models for both periodic and continuous review inventory policies when the decision-making rights are split between a supplier and a retailer. The second essay also examines a vendor-managed inventory (VMI) agreement. The last essay proposes a novel approach to workload balancing for a company that faces deterministic nonstationary demand and has little, or no, ability to hold inventory.; The first two essays seek to answer the following research questions: (1) when does decentralized decision making result in the greatest loss in supply chain performance and (2) what effect does the distribution of channel power have on system and individual agent performance. Channel power here refers to an agent's relative ability to control the decision making process and is modeled using a game-theoretic framework. We characterize optimal policies where possible and we use numerical analysis to generate insights. We find that, from a supply chain perspective, asymmetric power decision structures lead to better performance and customer service. Surprisingly, we identify cases where the lowest costs are incurred at the agent level when the agent is a follower and not a leader in the Stackelberg game. Our analysis also identifies the environmental conditions when the penalty from decentralized decision making is largest and shows that concentrating channel power with one of the agents can represent a viable alternative to coordination mechanisms, when the latter are costly to implement.; In the third essay, we use Fourier analysis and Walsh basis functions to decompose an input workload profile into a portfolio of recurrent insourcing and outsourcing contracts to better achieve some desired constant workload level. In addition, we develop mathematical programs based on principles from goal programming formulations to answer important practical questions such as: (1) how should a company create a portfolio of contracts to balance workload over time; (2) how should the portfolio be customized to reflect special needs with respect to time, volume, etc., (3) what is the benefit of holding inventory as a supplement to subcontracting.
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