The aim of this paper is to quantify the benefit of demand and inventory smoothing in contrasting the extreme volatility and impetuous alteration of the market produced by the current economic recession. To do so we model a traditional supply chain and we test five settings of order smoothing...

Many high-tech supply chain operate in a context of high process and market uncertainties due to shorter product life cycles. When introducing a new product, a company must manage the cost of supply, including the cost of returns over its short life cycle. The returns distribution looks like a...