Honglin Yang

1. The supply and demand mismatch brings huge challenges to supply chain management. To reduce demand uncertainty, supply chain managers adopt advanced technology to collect new market signal and u...

We study the optimal retail price and service level in a dual-channel supply chain in which the manufacturer may sell products through its online channel and offline retailer. Consumers with channel preference make their purchasing decision based on retail price, service level and channel valuation difference. We consider the reference price effect into a Hotelling utility function to formulate the competition of retail price and service level. We analytically derive the unique equilibrium separately in three power structures: (1) Manufacturer-led Stackelberg game (MS), (2) Retailer-led Stackelberg game (RS) and (3) Nash game (N). Particularly, we characterize the impacts of channel valuation difference and reference price effect intensity on the optimal decision and expected profit. In contrast to the previous literature on the dominance of the supply chain in that the dominance always can raise the dominant enterprise's profit, our findings indicate that supply chain members with channel advantages and channel disadvantages have different preferences for power structure. The member with channel disadvantages should give up dominance. Only when channel valuation difference is significant or reference price effect intensity is weak, the member with channel advantages will fight for dominance. Nash game is highly competitive in that the members only earn less profit. Numerical examples verified theoretical results.

The paper focuses on a supply chain consisting of one supplier and one capital-constrained retailer. The retailer can solve the limited working capital problem through a bank, an investor, or its supplier. When facing business risks brought by uncertain demand, the retailer and the supplier are risk-averse behavior. To better explore the financing decision, we consider the supplier has two different cases: monopolist firm and non-monopolist firm. We first use the CVaR criterion to incorporate the members' risk-averse behavior into the objectives function. Then the equilibrium results of the supply chain are derived under three financing schemes, respectively. Our analysis finds when the supplier is a relatively low risk-averse monopolist firm, trade credit financing is the unique financing equilibrium. When the supplier is a relatively high risk-averse monopolist firm and non-monopolist firm, schemes, if the valuation level is relatively low, all members prefer bank credit financing. Otherwise, the members prefer equity financing. By tuning the valuation level, we obtain the conditions in which the supply chain realizes Pareto improvement relative to the other two financing schemes. Finally, we use numerical analysis to verify the above theoretical results.

We investigate how to coordinate a two-echelon supply chain in which a supplier builds production capacity in advance and a manufacturer makes the ordering decision based on updated demand information. By combining European call option and buyback mechanisms, we propose a new hybrid option-buyback contract to coordinate such a supply chain with demand information updating. We construct a two-stage optimization model in that the supplier offers option price and the manufacturer decides initial ordering quantity in the first stage, then the supplier offers exercise price and buyback price and the manufacturer decides final ordering quantity in the second stage after demand information is updated. In both the centralized and decentralized settings, we analytically derive the optimal equilibrium solutions of two-stage ordering quantity. Particularly, we obtain closed-form formulae to describe the members' optimal behavior with a bivariate uniformly distribution. We prove that the proposed contracts can realize the perfect coordination of the supply chain and analyze how the proposed contracts affect the members' decisions. The theoretical results show that, by tuning the option price or buyback price, the supply chain profit can be arbitrarily split between the members, which is a desired property for supply chain coordination. Compared with the standard option and buyback contract, the proposed contract results in a greater supply chain profit and achieves Pareto improvement for the supply chain members. Furthermore, extending the baseline model focusing on price-independent demand to the case of price-dependent demand, we show that the proposed contract still can achieve supply chain coordination. Numerical examples are also conducted to complement the theoretical results.

This paper studies a three‐echelon supply chain consisting of a commercial bank, an e‐commerce platform, and a capital‐constrained online retailer. Due to limited creditworthiness, the retailer can only obtain a restricted bank loan, while the remaining needs to resort to the e‐commerce platform to fund its business. We formulate a three‐echelon Stackelberg game in which the bank is a leader, the e‐commerce platform is a subleader, and the retailer is a follower. We analytically derive the optimal interest rates of the bank and the e‐commerce platform and the optimal order quantity of the retailer. Compared with the nonfinancing case, we characterize the regions of the interest rates charged by the bank and the e‐commerce platform under which Pareto improvement can be achieved. We also present the retailer's financing preference under equilibrium and show how the initial capital affects the retailer's financing selection. Numerical examples demonstrate that the retailer's order quantity and expected profit increase with the bank's loan ratio.