Stable alliance structures among monopoly component-suppliers in a decentralized assembly system are somewhat well understood. However, when there are competing suppliers for any particular component, less is known about such alliances. The intent of this paper is to address some of the...

In this paper, we examine a supply chain in which a single supplier sells to a downstream newsvendor-type retailer. We make two assumptions that enrich this simple and well-understood model. First, we consider a multi-period model, in which the sequence of events is as follows. In a period, t,...