In this paper we consider a 1-warehouse, N-retailer inventory system where demand occurs at all locations. We introduce an inventory model which allows us to set different service levels for retailers and direct customer demand at the warehouse. For each retailer a critical level is defined, such that a retailer replenishment order is delivered from warehouse stock if and only if the stock leve...

The use of the WWW as a venue for voicing opinions, complaints and recommendations on products and firms has been widely reported in the popular media. However little is known how consumers use these reviews and if they subsequently have any influence on evaluations and purchase intentions of products and retailers. This study examines the effect of negative reviews on retailer evaluation and p...

We model a supply chain consisting of a national brand manufacturer and an independent manufacturer, both of whom are potential suppliers of store brand to a single retailer. The retailer serves two customer segments – a quality sensitive segment (high type) and a price sensitive (low type) segment. The retailer serves these two segments by targeting the national and store brands to the quality...

We consider a supply chain system with a risk-neutral manufacturer as the leader and a risk-averse retailer as the follower in the environment with uncertain demand. At the beginning of the game, the manufacturer makes investment on promotion effort and then the retailer decides his ordering quantity before demand realization. The analysis of equilibrium strategies of this Stackelberg game indi...

When an innovative product is introduced into the market, consumers are often uncertain about the product value. Over time they may learn the value of product. This paper studies the impact of consumer learning on the firms' marketing efforts and revenue sharing strategies in a supply chain that sells an innovative product to consumers over multiple periods. Both the supplier and the retailer c...

A fundamental decision for any manufacturer is when to sell to a downstream retailer. A manufacturer can sell either early, i.e., well in advance of the selling season, or late, i.e., close to the selling season. This paper examines the impact of information asymmetry, retailer sales effort, and contract type on the manufacturer’s sale-timing decision. We find that if information is symmetric, ...

This paper attempts to provide an explanation for a long-standing observation in supply chain management: while our models typically show that simple contracts cannot induce credible forecast sharing between different parties within the supply chain, why do firms often use them in practice, and exchange information through unverifiable communication (“cheap talk”)? We address this question usin...

Businesses (retailers) often wish to offer personalized advertisements (coupons) to individuals (consumers), but run the risk of strong reactions from consumers who want a customized shopping experience but feel their privacy has been violated. Existing models for privacy such as differential privacy or information theory try to quantify privacy risk but do not capture the subjective experience...

The main purpose of this paper is to investigate the optimal retailer’s replenishment decisions under two levels of trade credit policy within the economic production quantity (EPQ) framework. We assume that the supplier would offer the retailer a delay period and the retailer also adopts the trade credit policy to stimulate his/her customer demand to develop the retailer’s replenishment model ...