In this paper we analyze the impact of supply-side externalities existing among downstream retailers on supply chain performance. Namely, multiple retail firms face stochastic demand, purchase the product from the upstream wholesaler, and make stocking decisions that affect all other retailers...

We consider a stochastic, capacitated production-inventory model in which the customer provides information about the expected timing of future orders to the supplier. We allow for randomness in customer order arrivals as well as the quantity demanded, but work under the assumption that the...

This paper examines the interactions between routing and inventory-management decisions in a two-level supply chain consisting of a cross-docking warehouse and N retailers. Retailer demand is normally distributed and independent across retailers and over time. Travel times are fixed between...

A returns policy, which specifies a schedule of rebates from manufacturer to retailer for product left over at the end of the selling season, encourages larger order quantities and can increase manufacturer profit. One downside from a manufacturer's perspective is the possibility of very low...

The third-party logistics industry has grown rapidly in recent years, accounting for $46 billion of the total $921 billion in logistics spending in the United States during 1999. This figure is expected to grow by 15 to 20% annually as manufacturing firms increasingly partner with third-party...

In this paper, we investigate price-only contracts in supply chain capacity procurement games. For a two-party supply chain, comprising a manufacturer and a supplier that both invest in capacity, we prove the existence of a class of coordinating price-only contracts that arbitrarily allocate the...

A supply system's fill rate is the fraction of demand that is met from on-hand inventory. This paper presents formulas for the fill rate of periodic review supply systems that use base-stock-level policies. The first part of the paper contains fill-rate formulas for a single-stage system and...

Many theoretical models adopt a normative approach and assume that decision makers are perfect optimizers. In contrast, this paper takes a descriptive approach and considers bounded rationality, in the sense that decision makers are prone to errors and biases. Our decision model builds on the...

This paper shows that an ARMA demand generates an ARMA order history when ordering decisions are made based on an order-up-to policy. The order history preserves the autoregressive structure of the demand and transforms its moving average structure according to a simple algorithm. We apply this...

We examine the placement of safety stocks in a supply chain for which we have an evolving demand forecast. Under assumptions about the forecasts, the demand process, and the supply chain structure, we show that safety-stock placement for such systems is effectively equivalent to the...