350 research outputs found

    Reverse logistics pricing strategy for a green supply chain: a view of customers’ environmental awareness

    Get PDF
    The effectiveness of a reverse logistics strategy is contingent upon the successful execution of activities related to materials and product reuse. Green supply chain (GSC) in reverse logistics aims to minimize byproducts from ending up in landfills. This paper considers a retailer responsible for recycling and a manufacturer responsible for remanufacturing. Customer environmental awareness (CEA) is operationalized as customer word-of-mouth effect. We form three game theoretic models for two different scenarios with different pricing strategies, i.e. a non-cooperative pricing scenario based on Stackelberg equilibrium and Nash equilibrium, and a joint pricing scenario within a cooperative game model. The paper suggests that stakeholders are better off making their pricing and manufacturing decision in cooperation

    A bi-objective model for scheduling green investments in two-stage supply chains

    Get PDF
    Investing in green technologies to increase sustainability in supply chains has become a common practice for two reasons: the first is directly related to the defense of the environment and people’s health to smooth the emissions of pollutants; the second is the increasing consumer awareness of green products. Despite the higher costs of producing with green technologies and processes, there is also a higher markup on the price of products which rewards the former costs. This study proposes a mathematical model for scheduling green investments over time in a two-stage supply chain to minimize the impact of production on the environment and the economic costs deriving from the investment. The resulting bi-objective model has nonlinear constraints and is solved using a commercial solver. Given its complexity, we propose an upper-bound heuristic and a lower-bound model to reduce the optimality gap attained at a given time limit. Tests on synthetic instances have been conducted, and an example demonstrates the applicability and efficacy of the proposed model

    Dynamic Demand and Pricing Strategy in the E-Book Market

    Get PDF
    E-reading has experienced rapid growth in the past few years and has raised new questions. On the supply side, retailers such as Amazon jointly sell e-readers and e-books. It remains unclear how they can coordinate the two products to conduct intertemporal price discrimination (IPD). On the demand side, it remains unclear how much of e-book sales come from cannibalizing print books and how much serve as market expansion to the book business. I empirically address these questions using individual-level data from 2008 to 2012. I estimate a dynamic structural model of consumer e-reader adoption and subsequent book purchases, including quantity, reading format (e-book or print book), and retailer choices (Amazon, other online retailers, or offline bookstores) in a number of book genres. The estimation reveals two consumer types, avid readers and general readers, who self-select into buying e-readers based on their unobserved heterogeneous book tastes. Compared with general readers, avid readers buy more books, adopt e-readers earlier, and have larger cannibalization rates. The two types also have different relative demand elasticities between e-readers and e-books. Given the estimated demand system, I simulate the optimal dynamic pricing strategies of e-readers and e-books for the monopolist retailer Amazon who faces forward-looking consumers. I find that Amazon should harvest on e-readers and invest in e-books. Complementarity provides the firm a novel dimension of consumer heterogeneity (the relative demand elasticities between e-readers and e-books) to exploit. The joint IPD strategy provides a better screening device for more profitable consumers and limits consumer\u27s ability to intertemporally arbitrage. To evaluate the impact of e-books on print book sales, I simulate the world without e-books and compare it with the observed one. I find that 42% of e-book sales come from cannibalizing print book sales and that 58% come from market expansion. Of the cannibalization effect, offline bookstores bear 53% of the cannibalization loss, while Amazon bears 32% and other online retailers bear 15%. I further explore how the impact of e-books would change under alternative pricing arrangements. Overall, the results have managerial implications to publishers, book retailers, and policymakers in the e-book market

    Decision Making in Supply Chains with Waste Considerations

    Get PDF
    As global population and income levels have increased, so has the waste generated as a byproduct of our production and consumption processes. Approximately two billion tons of municipal solid waste are generated globally every year – that is, more than half a kilogram per person each day. This waste, which is generated at various stages of the supply chain, has negative environmental effects and often represents an inefficient use or allocation of limited resources. With the growing concern about waste, many governments are implementing regulations to reduce waste. Waste is a often consequence of the inventory decisions of different players in a supply chain. As such, these regulations aim to reduce waste by influencing inventory decisions. However, determining the inventory decisions of players in a supply chain is not trivial. Modern supply chains often consist of numerous players, who may each differ in their objectives and in the factors they consider when making decisions such as how much product to buy and when. While each player makes unilateral inventory decisions, these decisions may also affect the decisions of other players. This complexity makes it difficult to predict how a policy will affect profit and waste outcomes for individual players and the supply chain as a whole. This dissertation studies the inventory decisions of players in a supply chain when faced with policy interventions to reduce waste. In particular, the focus is on food supply chains, where food waste and packaging waste are the largest waste components. Chapter 2 studies a two-period inventory game between a seller (e.g., a wholesaler) and a buyer (e.g., a retailer) in a supply chain for a perishable food product with uncertain demand from a downstream market. The buyer can differ in whether he considers factors affecting future periods or the seller’s supply availability in his period purchase decisions – that is, in his degree of strategic behavior. The focus is on understanding how the buyer’s degree of strategic behavior affects inventory outcomes. Chapter 3 builds on this understanding by investigating waste outcomes and how policies that penalize waste affect individual and supply chain profits and waste. Chapter 4 studies the setting of a restaurant that uses reusable containers instead of single-use ones to serve its delivery and take-away orders. With policy-makers discouraging the use of single-use containers through surcharges or bans, reusable containers have emerged as an alternative. Managing inventories of reusable containers is challenging for a restaurant as both demand and returns of containers are uncertain and the restaurant faces various customers types. This chapter investigates how the proportion of each customer type affects the restaurant’s inventory decisions and costs

    Revenue Management and Demand Fulfillment: Matching Applications, Models, and Software

    Get PDF
    Recent years have seen great successes of revenue management, notably in the airline, hotel, and car rental business. Currently, an increasing number of industries, including manufacturers and retailers, are exploring ways to adopt similar concepts. Software companies are taking an active role in promoting the broadening range of applications. Also technological advances, including smart shelves and radio frequency identification (RFID), are removing many of the barriers to extended revenue management. The rapid developments in Supply Chain Planning and Revenue Management software solutions, scientific models, and industry applications have created a complex picture, which appears not yet to be well understood. It is not evident which scientific models fit which industry applications and which aspects are still missing. The relation between available software solutions and applications as well as scientific models appears equally unclear. The goal of this paper is to help overcome this confusion. To this end, we structure and review three dimensions, namely applications, models, and software. Subsequently, we relate these dimensions to each other and highlight commonalities and discrepancies. This comparison also provides a basis for identifying future research needs.Manufacturing;Revenue Management;Software;Advanced Planning Systems;Demand Fulfillment

    Improving firm performance through sustainable operations

    Get PDF
    As concerns over environmental sustainability rise, corporations must extend their efforts to improve their environmental performance while at the same time realizing economic growth. The endeavor represents challenges on both strategic and operational fronts, in particular regarding supply chains. This dissertation is thus motivated by the opportunity for businesses to improve their overall performance through their supply chain strategies and operations. In the first research project, we address the strategic opportunities by developing a theoretical framework to identify the dynamic capabilities required to obtain environmentally sustainable supply chains. We break down the internal and external capabilities in three hierarchical levels of organizational structure, and illustrate an application of the framework with a case study on the "Zero waste to disposal" initiative of Nestlé. In the second research project, we focus on the operational opportunities by analytically optimizing the replenishment frequency of perishable products between two supply chain levels. We model the manufacturer-retailer relationship as a Stackelberg game and show that raw material and finished goods lifetimes are interrelated through the replenishment cycle, and that they significantly impact supply chain costs. In the final project, we address both strategic and operational opportunities by empirically modelling the drivers of spoilage for days-fresh products, in our case fruits and vegetables, using daily supply chain data from Migros, Switzerland's largest retailer. We quantify to what extent inventory, promotions, delivery type, commitment changes, order variations, order cycle, and quality issues influence spoilage, and emphasize the necessity for specialized supply chain processes, tracking inventory age, and collaboration with supply chain partners for this fundamental product category

    AN EMPIRICAL EXAMINATION OF NEW INNOVATIVE PROCESSES IN RETAIL

    Get PDF
    Retailers constantly innovate to improve their operations to maintain a competitive advantage, which has become even more apparent following the challenges from the COVID-19 pandemic. One challenge with innovating, however, is that limited information is available to evaluate the effectiveness of the operations. Fortunately empirical methodologies of structural estimation and field experimentation can be used to help determine if innovative processes at retail chains are fruitful when implemented. Field experiments provide direct causal evidence on whether the innovations will work while structural estimation allows for examining counterfactual scenarios to evaluate outcomes from such process innovations. In this dissertation, we leverage structural estimation and field experimentation to study three topics on the frontier of innovations in retail operations: a) dynamic pricing of product drops in the presence of resellers, b) localization of inventory for e-commerce retailers, and c) increasing customer recycling through operational incentives. The key results are as follows. In Chapter 2, through structural estimation we show that incorporating resellers into pricing improves retailer profit by 7% on average, and the impacts of the resale market to firm profit are heterogeneous across products based on the initial inventory relative to the initial demand. In Chapter 3, through structural estimation we find that distribution centers closer to the customer (front DCs) allow the e-commerce retailer to capture an average 10.7% benefit to profit by improving average promised delivery time by 28.3%. Front DCs allow to capture sales from high-margin SKUs with high demand where backup fulfillment results in much longer promised delivery time. In Chapter 4, through field experiments we find that the chosen value-based incentives and convenience-based incentives are ineffective at inducing customers to engage in recycling behavior, despite importance of these incentives toward recycling intentions reported in the literature. Our results suggest that offering programs to encourage e-waste recycling behavior can be a costly endeavor.Doctor of Philosoph

    The effects of decision timing for pricing and marketing efforts in a supply chain with competing manufacturers

    Get PDF
    ProducciĂłn CientĂ­ficaThis paper investigates the impact of decision timing for pricing and marketing efforts in a supply chain led by competing manufacturers. We develop and solve six games to consider the scenarios (games) where prices and marketing efforts (ME) are decided simultaneously, and when they are not (i.e., ME is set either before or after prices). We examine these three scenarios for the benchmark case of a bilateral monopolistic channel, then extend the analysis to a supply chain with competing manufacturers. We identify the optimal decision timing by comparing equilibrium profits and strategies across games in each supply chain setup. We find that a monopolistic manufacturer always prefers that prices and ME be decided simultaneously. However, this result does not hold when product competition is taken into account. The optimal decision timing for competing manufacturers depends on the retailer's and manufacturers' ME effectiveness levels as well as on competition intensity. Specifically, when ME are not very effective, a simultaneous decision scenario is preferred because it provides the advantage of higher profit margins or sales. However, for highly effective ME, manufacturers prefer to decouple ME and pricing decisions. The retailer's optimal scenario is either to make all decisions simultaneously or to choose prices prior to ME. This means that supply chain firms can face conflict due to the decision timing for prices and ME

    Optimal Policies on Managing Drug Supply and Patient Access to Drugs

    Get PDF
    Health care decision-makers face several uncertainties regarding pharmaceutical products. For new and expensive drugs, the performance outside of clinical trials could be uncertain. For old and low-profit pharmaceutical products, the supply could be uncertain, causing drug shortages. In three essays, I study mitigating strategies to deal with different types of uncertainties associated with pharmaceutical products. In the first essay, I compare two types of pharmaceutical reimbursement contracts to mitigate the uncertainties associated with new and expensive drugs. I construct a game-theoretic model to analyze the interactions between a pharmaceutical manufacturer and a payer. The payer’s reimbursement of a drug is either related to the cost-effectiveness or the sales volume of the drug in the two contracts, respectively. I find key factors that determine the two parties’ preferences for the two contracts. I also find conditions under which each type is preferred by both parties and can achieve a Pareto improvement. In the second essay, I study mitigating strategies for drug shortage, which has become a serious problem in many countries in recent years. I construct a multi-period supply chain model to analyze the interactions between a representative hospital and an unreliable pharmaceutical manufacturer. The hospital owns an in-house manufacturer and can procure the drug from the two manufacturing facilities. I also assume that the hospital can make emergency production. I study the two parties’ procurement and production decisions and examine the impacts of the hospital’s optimal decisions on the external manufacturer’s profit. In the third essay, I study mitigating strategies for drug shortages from the governments’ perspective. I construct a game-theoretic model consisting of a pharmaceutical manufacturer, a wholesaler, and a government. I compare two types of mitigating strategies that the government can implement: providing subsidies to the wholesaler, or using a government-owned manufacturer. I identify key factors for the government’s preference over the two strategies and examine the impact on the private sector. The three essays have theoretical contributions to game theory and supply chain risk management literature and have policy implications for policymakers to manage drug supply and patient access to drugs
    • …
    corecore