Coordinating a supply chain with demand information updating

Abstract

<p style='text-indent:20px;'>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.</p>