Vendor-managed inventory (VMI) and consignment inventory (CI) are supply-chain sourcing practices between a vendor and customer. VMI allows the vendor to initiate orders on behalf of the customer. This presumably benefits the vendor who can then make replenishment decisions according to her own...

The desire to decrease logistics costs has led organizations to investigate more profitable approaches to supply chain management. Three proven, yet not fully integrated, supply chain levers are distribution network optimization, shipment consolidation, and cross-docking (Brockmann 1999). The...

Firms such as Wal-Mart and Campbell's Soup have successfully implemented vendor managed inventory (VMI). Articles in the trade press and academic literature often begin with the premise that VMI is ‘beneficial'; but beneficial to which party and under what conditions? We consider in this paper...

We study an increasingly popular retail practice called pickup partnership that allows online retailers to offer an in-store pickup service by partnering with a physical store. In practice, online retailers use two policies for such partnerships: (i) paying a fixed fee for each pickup order to...

Global trade is seafaring commerce: 90\% of traded goods are carried by maritime transport that has become vulnerable to security risks. This has led governments to initiate security programs serving tens of thousands of members worldwide. This paper studies the government’s incentive design...