Outsourcing through Three-dimensional Competition

Outsourcing through Competition: What is the Best Competition Parameter?

In this paper we consider a single buyer who wants to outsource the manufacturing of aproduct to N potential suppliers. The buyer’s objective is to maximize the service level shereceives from the suppliers. The suppliers compete for the buyer’s demand based on acompetition parameter which the buyer announces along with an allocation rule. We modeleach supplier as a make-to-s...

Outsourcing via Service Competition

We consider a single buyer who wishes to outsource a fixed demand for a manufactured good or service at a fixed price to a set of potential suppliers. We examine the value of competition as a mechanism for the buyer to elicit service quality from the suppliers. We compare two approaches the buyer could use to orchestrate this competition: (1) a Supplier-Allocation (SA) approach, which allocates...

Outsourcing induced by strategic competition

We show that intermediate goods can be sourced to firms on the “outside” (that do not compete in the final product market), even when there are no economies of scale or cost advantages for these firms. What drives the phenomenon is that “inside” firms, by accepting such orders, incur the disadvantage of becoming Stackelberg followers in the ensuing competition to sell the final product. Thus th...

Competition and Outsourcing with Scale Economies

Scale economies are commonplace in operations, yet, due to analytical challenges, relatively little is known about how ...rms should compete in their presence. This paper presents a model of competition between two ...rms that face scale economies; i.e., each ...rm’s cost per unit of demand is decreasing in demand. A general framework is used, which incorporates competition between two service ...

The Solution of Three Dimensional Incompressible Potential Flow Through Rectangular Ducts

Three-dimensional object metamorphosis through energy minimization

ÐThis paper presents a technique for smoothly blending some categories of three-dimensional polygonal objects. Polygon blending is usually considered a two-part process: generating vertex correspondences and interpolating between corresponding vertices to create the intermediate polygons. This paper considers the problem of automatic vertex correspondence determination. The proposed algorithm i...