We study a one-period supply chain problem consisting of numerous suppliers delivering a homogenous good. Individual supply is uncertain and may exhibit dependencies with other suppliers as well as with the stochastic demand. Assuming that reliability of supply represents an economic value for...

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...

The extant supply chain management literature has not addressed the issue of coordination in supply chains involving risk-averse agents. We take up this issue and begin with defining a coordinating contract as one that results in a Pareto-optimal solution acceptable to each agent. Our definition...

Problem Definition and Academic/Practical Relevance: Most supply networks are characterized by firms that source from multiple suppliers and suppliers that serve multiple firms, thus resulting in suppliers who differ in their degree centrality, i.e., the number of firms they supply to. In such...

We investigate how to use the guaranteed-service (GS) framework for multi-echelon supply chains when different parts of the supply chain are controlled by two different parties. We find that this framework is naturally well suited for decentralized decision-making, and we propose a specific...

Over the last two decades, differential game (DG) models have been used extensively to study such issues in dynamic environments as competitive advertising and pricing for new products in the marketing literature, capacity investments in the energy industry, government's subsidy policy in new...

We consider a supply chain in which a manufacturer sells an innovative durable product to an independent retailer over its life cycle. We assume that the product demand follows a Bass-type diffusion process, and it is determined by the market influences, retail price of the product, and shelf...