Simple auctions neglect the complex business constraints required by strategic sourcing. The Mars-IBM team created a procurement auction Web site www.number1traders.com that enables buyers to incorporate complex bid structures (such as bundled all-or-nothing bids and quantity-discounted bids) and business constraints into strategic-sourcing auctions. Outcomes in such auctions must lead to win-w...

This paper is intended to provide a detailed game-theoretical analysis of the buyer-vendor coordination problem embedded in the price-discount inventory model. Pure and mixed, cooperative and non-cooperative strategies are developed. Highlights of the paper include the full characterization of the Pareto optimal set, the determination of profit-sharing mechanisms for the cooperative case and th...

Since the onset of the 2008 financial crisis, many economists have studied the effects of unconventional monetary policies such as credit-easing policies or actions aimed at altering the maturity structure of the private sector’s asset holdings. But surprisingly, there has been relatively little work on one of the traditional policy tools of a central bank—required reserve ratios—and how requir...

We study competition and coordination in a supply chain in which a single supplier both operates a direct channel and sells its product through multiple differentiated retailers competing in quantities. We study analytically the supply chain with symmetric retailers and find that the supplier generally prefers to have as many retailers as possible in the market, even if the retailers’ equilibri...

This paper investigates the relationship between price discrimination and vertical product differentiation, using National Brands and Private Labels in the Carbonated Soft Drink market as a case study. We decompose prices difference into quantity discount and cost difference across packagings and recover marginal cost by a structural demand model of consumer preference and firm behavior. Our re...

It was suggested in 2004 by some researchers that it might be possible to improve production systems performance by applying the first and second laws of thermodynamics to reduce system entropy. Then these laws were used to modify the economic order quantity (EOQ) model to derive an equivalent entropic order quantity (EnOQ). Moreover the political instability or uncertainty of a country (as wel...

The number of retailers who directly deal with poultry farmers recently increases in Japan. It therefore becomes necessary for the poultry farmers to deliver products to the retailers frequently in accordance with the retailers’ demand. The poultry farmer’s inventory level increases due to the increase in the weight of the fowls, but at the same time, it decreases due to loss of the commercial ...

Purpose – This paper seeks to construct a model for inventory management for multiple periods. The model considers not only the usual parameters, but also price quantity discount, storage and batch size constraints. Design/methodology/approach – Mixed 0-1 integer programming is applied to solve the multi-period inventory problem and to determine an appropriate inventory level for each period. T...

The stochastic uncapacitated lot-sizing problems with incremental quantity discount have been studied in this paper. First, a multistage stochastic mixed integer model is established by the scenario analysis approach and an equivalent reformulation is obtained through proper relaxation under the decreasing unit order price assumption. The proposed reformulation allows us to extend the productio...

A large proportion of consumer returns fall into the category of false failure returns, which refer to returns without functional defects. In this paper, we consider profits resulting from exerting costly effort to reduce false failure returns in a reverse supply chain. The supply chain as a whole has a strong incentive to reduce such returns for cost saving. However, retailers typically enjoy ...