Supplier competition and investment of effort are important concerns in supply base design. They are affected not only by the number of suppliers, but also by their capacity profile. This paper studies supply base design in terms of the number and capacities of suppliers, considering both supplier competition and investment of cost-reduction effort. We analyze a buyer who invests in capacities ...

This paper develops a pricing and inventory model of a supply chain composing one supplier and two manufacturers in which the supplier sells its product to two competing manufacturers. Each manufacturer faces a deterministic demand that depends on his/her own and the other competitor sale price. Selling price for the supplier is time dependent and increment function.Both amelioration and deteri...

We study the supplier relationship choice for a buyer that invests in transferable capacity operated by a supplier. With a long-term relationship, the buyer commits to source from a supplier over a long period of time. With a short-term relationship, the buyer leaves open the option of switching to a new supplier in the future. The buyer has incomplete information about a supplier’s efficiency,...

This paper studies the risks in demand information sharing applications by electronic soft-orders using electronic data interchange (EDI) systems in e-commerce and aims to suggest a sustainable regulation mechanism with a trust-embedded contract. In a supply chain with one retailer and one supplier, the retailer solicits private forecasted demand and places soft-orders via EDI to the supplier. ...

In this paper, we devise a framework for obtaining the optimal ordering policy in a single location, continuous review inventory system with arbitrary inter-demand times. We show that it is optimal to order at demand arrival epochs only if the inter-demand time has constant or decreasing failure rate (CFR or DFR). When the inter-demand time has increasing failure rate (IFR), we show that the op...

Consider a supplier selling to multiple retailers. Demand varies across periods, but the supplier’s capacity and wholesale price are fixed. If demand is high, the retailers’ needs exceed capacity, and the supplier must implement an allocation mechanism to dole out production. We examine how the choice of mechanism impacts retailer actions and supply chain performance. In particular, we analyze ...