Supply chains today routinely use third parties for many strategic activities, such as manufacturing, R&D, or software development. These activities often include relationship-specific investment on the part of the vendor, while final outcomes can be uncertain. Therefore, writing complete...

This study investigates the strategic effect of return policies in a dual-channel supply chain, in which a manufacturer can sell products directly to end customers and indirectly via an independent retailer. The manufacturer decides whether to implement a return policy in either the direct or...

Channel sharing is an important marketing strategy for giant retailers who sell their own store brands and resell national brands for cooperative manufacturers simultaneously. To expand their market and increase profitability, national brand manufacturers may consider entering the online market...

A nearly explicit feedback Stackelberg-Nash equilibrium is obtained in a dynamic distribution channel consisting of a manufacturer and two competing asymmetric retailers engaged in promoting the manufacturer's product to be sold through the retailers. The manufacturer decides on its support for...

In this paper we characterize the feedback equilibrium of a general infinite-horizon Stackelberg-Nash differential game where the roles of the players are mixed. By mixed we mean that one player is a leader on some decisions and a follower on other decisions. We prove a verification theorem that...

We present a sufficient condition for a feedback Stackelberg equilibrium of a stochastic differential game on an infinite horizon. This condition gives rise to a system of elliptic partial differential equations involving a static Stackelberg game at the level of Lagrangian. As an example, we...

Frequent product introductions emphasize the importance of product rollover strategies. With single rollover, when a new product is introduced, the old product is phased out from the market. With dual rollover, the old product remains in the market together with the new product. We study the...

For most multi-period decision-making problems, it is generally well-accepted that the influence of information about later periods on the optimal decision in the current period reduces as we move farther into the future. If and when this influence reduces to zero, the corresponding problem...

Optimal control theory is employed to derive explicitly the optimal (profit maximizing) price of a durable new product over time. The sales rate dynamics depends on the product price and on the unsold portion of the market. Specifically, the hazard rate (i.e. the probability of a purchase by a...

This paper analyzes the tradeoff between (demand) substitution costs and (production) changeover costs in a discrete-time production-inventory setting using a two-product dynamic lot-sizing model with changeover, inventory carrying, and substitution costs. We first show that the problem is...