There are many circumstances in which manufacturers provide inputs to wholesale customers only to subsequently compete with these wholesale customers in the retail realm. Such dual distribution arrangements commonly suffer from excessive encroachment in that the manufacturer's ex post retail...

This paper highlights the rationale for exclusive territories in a model of repeated interaction between competing supply chains. We show that with observable contracts exclusive territories have two countervailing effects on manufacturers' incentives to sustain tacit collusion. First, granting...

This paper studies the impact of strategic customer behavior on supply chain performance. We start with a newsvendor seller facing forward-looking customers. The seller initially charges a regular price but may salvage the leftover inventory at a lower salvage price after random demand is...

This paper considers network supply chains with price dependent demand by modelling them as large acyclic networks. Such large networks are common in the automobile and apparel industries. We develop a model to analyze the effect of these large-scale problems involving long sequences of...

This paper studies the value to a supplier of obtaining better information about a buyer's cost structure, and of being able to offer more general contracts. We use the bilateral monopoly setting to analyze six scenarios: three increasingly general contracts (wholesale-pricing schemes, two-part...

An important issue in the management of supply chains and manufacturing systems is to control inventory costs at different locations throughout the system while satisfying an end-customer service-level requirement. The challenge involved is to solve a nonlinear constrained optimization problem...

Supply chains often consist of several tiers, with different numbers of firms competing at each tier. A major determinant of the structure of supply chains is the cost structure associated with the underlying manufacturing process. In this paper, we examine the impact of fixed and variable costs...

This paper examines the relationship between product architecture, supply-chain performance metrics, and supply-chain efficiency. We model the contracting relationship between a supplier and a buyer. The supplier is privately informed about the outcome of his design/production investment. The...

In this paper, we study competition in multiechelon supply chains with an assembly structure. Firms in the supply chain are grouped into homogenous sectors (nodes) that contain identical firms with identical production capabilities that all produce exactly one undifferentiated product (that may...

Firms routinely decide whether to make essential inputs themselves or buy the inputs from independent suppliers. Conventional wisdom suggests that a firm will not buy an input for a price above its in-house cost of production. We show that this is not necessarily the case when a monopolistic...