Overview and classification of coordination contracts within forward and reverse supply chains

Among coordination mechanisms, contracts are valuable tools used in both theory and practice to coordinate various supply chains. The focus of this paper is to present an overview of contracts and a classification of coordination contracts and contracting literature in the form of classification schemes. The two criteria used for contract classification, as resulted from contracting literature, are transfer payment contractual incentives and inventory risk sharing. The overview classification of the existing literature has as criteria the level of detail used in designing the coordination models with applicability on the forward and reverse supply chains.Coordination contracts; forward supply chain; reverse supply chain

The Impact of Cheap Talk on Supply Chain Performance in Case of Asymmetric Information: An Experimental Investigation

The use of screening contracts is a common approach to solve supply chain coordination problems under asymmetric information. One major assumption in this context is that subjects will rather use their private information strategically than to reveal them truthfully, if they do not get any incentives to do this. This harms supply chain performance. This paper investigates the influence of costless pre-game communication (i.e. communication without any direct incentives) between a supplier and a buyer in a lotsizing framework. A laboratory experiment was conducted to test, whether this costless pre-game communication has (in contradiction to standard game-theory) an influence on supply chain coordination.experimental economics, screening contracts, supply chain coordination

Dynamic joint investments in supply chains under information asymmetry

Supply chain management involves the selection, coordination and motivation of independently operated suppliers. However the central planner's perspective in operations management translates poorly to vertically separated chains, where suppliers may have rational myopic reasons to object to full in- formation sharing and centralized decision rights. Particular problems occur when a downstream coordinator demands relation-specific investments (equipment, cost improvements in processes, adaptation of components to downstream processes, allocation of future capacity etc) from upstream suppliers without being able to commit to long-term contracts. In practice and theory, this leads of- ten to a phenomenon of either underinvestment in the chain or costly vertical integration to solve the commitment problem. A two-stage supply chain under stochastic demand and information asymmetry is modelled. A repeated investment-production game with coordinator commitment in supplier's investment addresses the information sharing and asset- specific investment problem. We provide a mitigation of the hold-up problem on the investment cost observed by the supplier and an instrument for truthful revelation of private information by using an investment sharing device. We show that there is an interior solution for the investment sharing parameter and discuss some extensions to the work.supply chain management, investment, information

Designing multi-period supply contracts in a two-echelon supply chain with asymmetric information

We study a two-echelon supply chain consisting of a supplier and a retailer, where the supplier uses a simple and easily implementable incentive scheme - making a side payment - to influence the retailer’s ordering plan. The supplier makes a take-it-or-leave-it offer to the retailer in the form of a menu of contracts, each consisting of a procurement plan plus a side payment. The retailer, who possesses private information about customer demand and his cost parameters, either accepts one of the contracts or imposes his own optimal plan. We formulate the supplier’s problem of designing optimal contracts with the realistic assumption that the retailer’s outside option depends on his private information. Taking into account the retailer’s reaction to the proposed offer, the supplier faces a nested (bi-level) optimization problem, which we transform into a single-level mixed integer programming formulation. In our analysis, we use a network interpretation for the set of incentive constraints and show some properties of optimal contracts. This enables us to considerably reduce the number of incentive constraints and to find optimal values of the side payment quantities. Our findings regarding the possible behavior of the opportunistic retailer deviate from those of previous studies as a result of considering more realistic assumptions

Supply Chain Management and the Changing Structure of U.S. Organic Produce

Replaced with revised version of paper 08/31/06.supply chain, produce, organic, vertical coordination, Agribusiness,

Strategic Inventory and Supply Chain Behavior

Based on a serial supply chain model with 2-periods and price-sensitive demand, we present the first experimental test of the effect of strategic inventories on supply chain performance. In theory, if holding costs are low enough, the buyer builds up a strategic inventory (even if no operational reasons for stock-holding exist) to limit the supplier\u27s market power, to increase the own profit share, and to enhance the overall supply chain performance. The supplier anticipates the effect of the strategic inventory and differentiates prices to capture a part of the increased supply chain profits. Our results show that the positive effects of strategic inventories are even more pronounced than theoretically predicted, because strategic inventories empower buyers to reduce payoff inequalities and suppliers exhibit a willingness to reduce inequalities as long as their payoff remains above a certain threshold. Overall, strategic inventories have a double positive effect, a strategic and a behavioral, both reducing the average wholesale prices and damping the double marginalization effect and the latter leading to more equitable payoffs

Integration and coordination in after-sales service logistics

Maintenance and after-sales service logistics are important disciplines that have received considerable attention both in practice and in the scientific literature. This attention is related to the often high investments and revenues associated with capital-intensive assets in technically advanced business environments. Different maintenance services such as inspections and preventive maintenance activities are executed with the goal to maximize the availability of these expensive assets. However, unavoidable failures may still happen, which means that, in addition to preventive maintenance and services, repair actions (corrective maintenance) are necessary. Spare parts, service engineers and tools are typically the main resources for executing the repair actions and their availability has a major impact on overall system downtime. In this dissertation, we analyze a multi-resource after-sales service supply chain consisting of a service provider and an emergency supplier. The service provider is contractually responsible for the timely repair of some randomly failing capital intensive assets. To execute a repair, the service provider needs both service engineers and spare parts to replace the malfunctioning parts. In case of spare parts stock out, the service provider can either wait for the regular replenishment of parts or decide to hand over the entire repair call to an emergency supplier. For the latter case, a contract between the service provider and the emergency supplier is necessary to specify the compensation. In the first part of this dissertation, we focus on the optimal integrated planning of spare parts and engineers, considering an asset availability constraint. We evaluate the system performance using Markov chain analysis and queueing models, and employ different optimization algorithms to jointly determine the optimal capacity of the resources. This integrated planning results in considerable cost savings compared to the separate planning of spare parts and engineers. In the second part, we investigate the best contract the supplier can offer to the service provider. Furthermore, we propose different coordinated contracts to achieve optimal revenues for both partners in this after-sales service supply chain, under both full and asymmetric information scenarios. Cooperative games, the dominance of one party over the other (Stackelberg game), and information sharing aspects are the tools included in the second part of this dissertation

Analysis of supply contracts with commitments and flexibility

In this article we address an important class of supply contracts called the Rolling Horizon Flexibility (RHF) contracts. Under such a contract, at the beginning of the horizon a buyer has to commit requirements for components for each period into the future. Usually, a supplier provides limited flexibility to the buyer to adjust the current order and future commitments in a rolling horizon manner. We present a general model for a buyer's procurement decision under RHF contracts. We propose two heuristics and derive a lower bound. Numerically, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the heuristics for both stationary and non-stationary demands. We show that the heuristics are easy to compute, and hence, amenable to practical implementation. We also propose two measures for the order process that allow us to (a) evaluate the effectiveness of RHF contracts in restricting the variability in the orders, and (b) measure the accuracy of advance information vis-a-vis the actual orders. Numerically we demonstrate that the order process variability decreases significantly as flexibility decreases without a dramatic increase in expected costs. Our numerical studies provide several other managerial insights for the buyer; for example, we provide insights into how much flexibility is sufficient, the value of additional flexibility, the effect of flexibility on customer satisfaction (as measured by fill rate), etc. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2008Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/60455/1/20300_ftp.pd