We consider the Retail Planning Problem in which the retailer chooses suppliers, and determines the production, distribution and inventory planning for products with uncertain demand in order to minimize total expected costs. This problem is often faced by large retail chains that carry private label products. We formulate this problem as a convex mixed integer program and show that it is stron...

This paper analyzes the role of communication between firms in an infinitely repeated Bertrand game in which firms receive an imperfect private signal of a common value i.i.d. demand shock. Communication allows firms to coordinate on the most collusive price and it eliminates the possibility of undetectable price cuts. It is shown that firms can use stochastic intertemporal market sharing as a ...

The type of industry we want to analyze in this paper is comprised of multiple manufacturers, each selling differentiated products through multiple exclusive retailers. The retailers are faced with fixed market prices but uncertain demands. Industries falling in this category include telecommunication industry, fast food chains, gasoline, etc. The manufacturers competition, the retailers compet...

This paper introduces a robust inventory routing problem where a supplier distributes a single product to multiple customers facing dynamic uncertain demands over a finite discrete time horizon. The probability distribution of the uncertain demand at each customer is not fully specified. The only available information is that these demands are independent and symmetric random variables which ca...

Numerous contract scenarios in information technology goods and services, telecommunications, digital entertainment, and supply chain contracting feature demand uncertainty for individual customers (demand is subject to idiosyncratic demand shocks that change marginal valuations). Sellers in these scenarios often use non-linear pricing mechanisms (flat rate, two part tariffs, three-part tariffs...

A finite number of heterogeneous firms facing demand-induced price fluctuations imperfectly compete for heterogeneous workers. Because firms must commit to wages and employment before the realization of product price, they exhibit a risk-averse behavior. It is then shown that unemployment may arise in equilibrium because of the combination of uncertainty on product price and mismatch between wo...

In transportation planning there can be long lead times to adapt capacity. This paper addresses two questions. First, in a one mode world (say rail or road), what is the optimal capacity choice when faced with uncertain demand, long lead times and congestion. Using a simple analytical model it is shown that when demand is inelastic, it is socially optimal to invest more than if only the expecte...

We consider a market game with a continuum of consumers, where the measure of each type is stochastic. Nature selects the set of active consumers, who make bids and o¤ers on ` ¡ 1 spot market trading posts. Existence of type-symmetric Nash equilibrium is proven. When facing price uncertainty, best responses are unique, and a Nash equilibrium to the sell-all game is typically not a Nash equilibr...

The integration of intermittent resources of power generation, such as wind and solar, will lead to unprecedented energy price fluctuations and increasing price uncertainty. Besides improving forecasting, electricity retailers can meet this challenge by partly adopting the demand side of the electricity markets to the fluctuating supply side. The necessary communication infrastructure for this ...

Measuring demand uncertainty is a key activity in supply chain planning. Of various methods of estimating the standard deviation of demand, one that has been employed successfully in the recent literature uses dispersion among experts’ forecasts. However, there has been limited empirical validation of this methodology. In this paper we provide a general methodology for estimating the standard d...