Partnership issues and coordination in decentralized supply chains.

摘要

Supply chain coordination models implicitly assume that cost and other parameters are unaffected by decentralization, thus rendering the integrated firm a system-optimal benchmark. A case in point is independent downstream firms vs. corresponding divisions of integrated firms, where, in fact, the former's production or operating costs are likely to be lower, due to specialization and different motivation. We re-analyze Lariviere and Porteus' (2001) “Selling to a Newsvendor” model with retailer's operating cost, allowing for non-linear production costs and provide comparative statics on lot sizes, wholesale prices and profits. We then explore investment in reducing downstream operating costs. To overcome the fact that investment is lower in a decentralized chain than in an integrated one, we propose several coordination mechanisms—buybacks, revenue sharing and operating subsidy with a license fee.; Although a reduction in the number of suppliers is often portrayed as beneficial, it is evidently not always so. Supply chain coordination and upstream competition play joint roles in maximizing performance. We investigate a situation in which competition among (potential) suppliers is a more important device for increasing system performance than coordination. With linear production costs and homogeneous suppliers, the smaller the number of suppliers, the better the system performance. When, on the other hand, suppliers are heterogeneous or there is a quality problem, the system performance would improve with multiple suppliers. Our analysis is based on a two-tier supply chain with newsvendor-type demand, and uses a game theoretic approach which guarantees profit reservation levels of suppliers.; In the next model, we analyze revenue sharing contracts in a rental business where products are used several times for generating revenue. The main research question is: How should a video rental chain replenish new movies over time? Clearly, any such policy would consist of two key dimensions—the number of copies purchased and when to remove a movie from front shelves and replace it by a newly released one. We first analyze this bi-variate problem for an integrated chain. As for decentralized chains, we show that a (wholesale) price-only contract cannot coordinate such a chain. We then consider a price + revenue sharing contract. Such a contract can achieve coordination, but the unique price and share which are needed may not provide one of the parties with its desired profit (i.e., will violate individual rationality). That is what the situation turned out to be in the case of Blockbusters Video (Stewart 2001). We thus propose adding a third lever—a license fee (or subsidy) associated with each new movie. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)