Should firms conceal information when dealing with common suppliers?

A firm making quantity decision under uncertainty loses profit if its private information is leaked to competitors. Outsourcing increases this risk as a third party supplier may leak information for its own benefit. The firm may choose to conceal information from the competitors by entering in a confidentiality agreement with the supplier. This, however, diminishes the firm's ability to dampen competition by signaling a higher quantity commitment. We examine this trade‐off in a stylized supply chain in which two firms, endowed with private demand information, order sequentially from a common supplier, and engage in differentiated quantity competition. In our model, the supplier can set different wholesale prices for firms, and the second‐mover firm could be better informed. Contrary to what is expected, information concealment is not always beneficial to the first mover. We characterize conditions under which the first mover firm will not prefer concealing information. We show that this depends on the relative informativeness of the second mover and is moderated by competition intensity. We examine the supplier's incentive in participating in information concealment, and develop a contract that enables it for wider set of parameter values. We extend our analysis to examine firms' incentive to improve information. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 62:1–15, 2015     

装备项目型供应链风险控制策略

项目型供应链管理模式能有效实现装备研制过程中行为主体间的优势互补和资源的优化配置,利于供应链整体效益的提高,但各种不确定性因素会导致主体间风险传递行为的发生。为提供风险控制有效对策,通过考虑节点位置重要度和属性重要度,构建了项目型供应链节点重要度评估模型;通过衡量行为主体风险识别和风险控制的努力程度,给出了行为主体抗风险努力程度的评价方法,最后提出了一种基于节点重要度和抗风险努力程度的项目型供应链利益分配策略,该策略能有效促使行为主体主动进行风险识别和风险控制,是一种"风险共担、利益共享"的项目型供应链合作博弈策略。     

关于推进农业产业化经营的思考

推进农业产业化经营的关键是抓务实。这就要求:从科学区分外部拉动型、内部合作型、产业链一体化型三种农业产业化经营基本类型和正确处理土地规模经营与家庭承包经营、发展农业与发展其他产业、政府宏观调控与企业、农户自主经营的关系入手,科学选择农业产业化经营的模式;在正确把握目前我国农业产业化经营在农产品竞争力、市场建设、利益机制、政府行为等方面存在的问题的基础上,采取相应对策。     

Lot streaming with supplier–manufacturer coordination

Lot splitting refers to breaking a production lot into smaller sublots during production. Coordinating lot splitting decisions across multiple stages of a production process is a challenging task. Traditional lot splitting and lot streaming models implicitly assume that the entire system is operated and owned by the same firm, or there exists a coordinator who controls the operation of all machines in the system. In this paper, we consider the situation where the machines in a multiple‐stage production process are owned and managed by different companies. Every item in a given production lot has to go through the processing by the supplier's machine, followed by the manufacturer's machine, and so on. We develop and analyze coordination mechanisms that enable different parties in the supply chain to coordinate their lot splitting decisions so as to achieve a systemwide optimum. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2004     

Double Mover–Stayer model on customer switching in telecommunications industry

Customer acquisition and customer retention are the most important challenges in the increasingly competitive telecommunications industry. Traditional studies of customer switching always assume that customers are homogeneous, and thus that model customer switching behavior follows a Markov formulation. However, this postulation is obviously inappropriate in most instances. Blumen et al. (Cornell Studies of Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 1955) developed the Mover–Stayer (MS) model, a generalization of the Markov chain model, to relax the requirement of homogeneity and allow the presence of heterogeneity with two different types of individuals—“stayers,” who purchase the same kinds of products or services throughout the entire observation period; and “movers,” who look for variety in products or services over time. There are two purpose of this article. First, we extend the MS model to a Double Mover‐Stayer (DMS) model by assuming the existence of three types of individuals in the market: (1) stable and loyal customers, who have stable usage within the same company; (2) instable but loyal customers, whose usage varies within the same company over time; and (3) disloyal customers, who switch from one company to another to seek for new experiences or/and benefits. We also propose an estimation method for the DMS model. Second, we apply the DMS model to telecommunications data and demonstrate how it can be used for pattern identification, hidden knowledge discovery, and decision making. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2012     

Inventory pooling games for expensive,low‐demand spare parts

We consider several independent decision makers who stock expensive, low‐demand spare parts for their high‐tech machines. They can collaborate by full pooling of their inventories via free transshipments. We examine the stability of such pooling arrangements, and we address the issue of fairly distributing the collective holding and downtime costs over the participants, by applying concepts from cooperative game theory. We consider two settings: one where each party maintains a predetermined stocking level and one where base stock levels are optimized. For the setting with fixed stocking levels, we unravel the possibly conflicting effects of implementing a full pooling arrangement and study these effects separately to establish intuitive conditions for existence of a stable cost allocation. For the setting with optimized stocking levels, we provide a simple proportional rule that accomplishes a population monotonic allocation scheme if downtime costs are symmetric among participants. Although our whole analysis is motivated by spare parts applications, all results are also applicable to other pooled resource systems of which the steady‐state behavior is equivalent to that of an Erlang loss system. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2012     

基于证据理论的战时军械维修器材供应链性能评价

在一般供应链性能评价指标体系的基础上,结合现代战争中军械维修器材供应链的特点,从资源、输出和柔性三个角度构建了战时军械维修器材供应链性能评价的指标体系.考虑到战争环境下信息的模糊性和不确定性,建立了战时军械维修器材供应链性能评价的证据理论模型.以某战时军械维修器材供应链为例,基于构建的战时军械维修器材供应链性能评价指标体系和模型进行案例研究.结果表明,基于证据理论构建的战时军械维修器材供应链性能评价模型是可行的,有效的.     

Vertically restrictive pricing in supply chains with price‐dependent demand

We examine the behavior of a manufacturer and a retailer in a decentralized supply chain under price‐dependent, stochastic demand. We model a retail fixed markup (RFM) policy, which can arise as a form of vertically restrictive pricing in a supply chain, and we examine its effect on supply chain performance. We prove the existence of the optimal pricing and replenishment policies when demand has a linear additive form and the distribution of the uncertainty component has a nondecreasing failure rate. We numerically compare the relative performance of RFM to a price‐only contract and we find that RFM results in greater profit for the supply chain than the price‐only contract in a variety of scenarios. We find that RFM can lead to Pareto‐improving solutions where both the supplier and the retailer earn more profit than under a price‐only contract. Finally, we compare RFM to a buyback contract and explore the implications of allowing the fixed markup parameter to be endogenous to the model. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2006.     

Optimal division of inventory between depot and bases

We consider a problem of optimal division of stock between a logistic depot and several geographically dispersed bases, in a two‐echelon supply chain. The objective is to minimize the total cost of inventory shipment, taking into account direct shipments between the depot and the bases, and lateral transshipments between bases. We prove the convexity of the objective function and suggest a procedure for identifying the optimal solution. Small‐dimensional cases, as well as a limit case in which the number of bases tends to infinity, are solved analytically for arbitrary distributions of demand. For a general case, an approximation is suggested. We show that, in many practical cases, partial pooling is the best strategy, and large proportions of the inventory should be kept at the bases rather than at the depot. The analytical and numerical examples show that complete pooling is obtained only as a limit case in which the transshipment cost tends to infinity. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 64: 3–18, 2017