This paper examines contract practices between suppliers and retailers in the agricultural seed industry. We construct and analyze single-retailer models of various contract types actually used in the industry, which include, for example, certain “bonus” and “penalty” features. With no assumption on the demand distribution, we establish sufficient conditions for contract parameters to guarantee...

Abstract: Based on two substitute products, we study the inventory and contract coordination strategy of a three-echelon supply chain, which consists of two suppliers, a manufacturer and a retailer, under supply disruption and stochastic demand. We investigate the channel gross profit model of the centralized supply chain and obtain a unique optimal order quantity. Under a decentralized decisio...

Production coordination is a common phenomenon in supply chains. Unlike the existing literature, we examine the production coordination problem from the perspective of asymmetric information: how a manufacturer (leading firm) coordinates the relationships with its subsidiary firm(s) and, subsequently, how market returns influence the leading firm's expected utilities, agency cost and the subsid...

In recent years, the rise of farmer-supermarket direct purchase is one of the innovative modes in agricultural supply chain operations, study its operation is very important for improving the operational efficiency of the agricultural supply chain. This paper based on the newsboy model and centralized decision-making model, established agricultural supply chain coordination model with option co...

We study a coordination contract for a supplier-retailer channel producing and selling a fashionable product exhibiting a stochastic price-dependent demand. The product’s selling season is short, and the supply chain faces great demand uncertainty. We consider a scenario where the supplier reserves production capacity for the retailer in advance, and permits the retailer to place an order not e...

We present CO2 , a parametric calculus for contract-based computing in distributed systems. By abstracting from the actual contract language, our calculus generalises both the contracts-as-processes and contracts-as-formulae paradigms. The calculus features primitives for advertising contracts, for reaching agreements, and for querying the fulfilment of contracts. Coordination among participant...

Many researchers have shown that there is no single best organization or coordination mechanism for all environments. This paper discusses the design and implementation of an extendable family of coordination mechanisms, called Generalized Partial Global Planning (GPGP). The set of coordination mechanisms described here assists in scheduling activities for teams of cooperative computational age...

Auctions are promising decentralized methods for teams of agents to allocate and re-allocate tasks among themselves in dynamic, partially known and time-constrained domains with positive or negative synergies among tasks. Auctionbased coordination systems are easy to understand, simple to implement and broadly applicable. They promise to be efficient both in communication (since agents communic...

Information System Engineering has become under increasing pressure to come up with software solutions that endow systems with the agility that is required to evolve in a continually changing business and technological environment. In this paper, we suggest that Software Engineering has a contribution to make in terms of concepts and techniques that have been recently developed for Parallel Pro...

In this paper, we show that under certain conditions, strategic decentralization through the addition of a retailer in the distribution channel can increase a manufacturer’s profits. The specific case on which we focus is the quantity coordination (double marginalization) problem for a manufacturer selling durable goods in a two-period setting. We show that the standard solution that coordinate...