Optimal Supply Diversification Strategy under Supply Disruption

Abstract

When a disruption caused by human or environmental accident occurs in production systems, it may cause a shortage of the supply, and thus the buyers’ procurement behaviors will be influenced. This paper studies a supply chain comprised of a buyer and two types of suppliers: one is cheap but unreliable and the other is reliable but expensive. If there is a major disruption, the unreliable supplier may not be able to fully satisfy the buyer’s order, despite the fact that it exerts additional effort to rebuild capacity; at the same time, the reliable supplier cannot fulfill extra orders from the buyer due to capacity constraints. In this way, the buyer should strategically allocate its order between the two types of suppliers by offering different contracts at the very beginning, and then the unreliable supplier chooses its optimal restoration effort according to the contract if a disruption occurs. The model is built based on the real-life cases such as Walmart and Apple such that it is the buyer who determines the wholesale price of the unreliable supplier’s products. The results show the optimal contracts provided by the buyer under different circumstances, which aims to help managers design their contracts under disruption risks to maximize the company’s profit.