In a buyer-supplier game, a special type of assignment game, a distinguished player, called the buyer, wishes to purchase some combinatorial structure. A set of players, called suppliers, offer various components of the structure for sale. Any combinatorial minimization problem can be transformed into a buyer-supplier game. While most previous work has been concerned with characterizing the cor...

In recent years, companies have found that there are substantial benefit and competitive advantage from establishing a long-term sole-supplier relationship with supplier. In the integrated inventory model practices characterized by a sole-supplier base whose firm is located close to the buyer’s plant and makes frequent deliveries is considered a long-term partner with the buying company. The ch...

A supplier stocking goods for delivery to a retailer may face a finite-horizon service-level agreement. In this context, the service-level agreement is a commitment by a supplier to achieve a minimum fill rate over a specified time horizon. This kind of service level agreement is an important, but under-studied coordination mechanism. We focus on the impact of two contract parameters, the lengt...

This paper considers the joint supplier selection, replenishment and manufacturing control problem in a dynamic stochastic context. This problem is characterized by conflicting interests between suppliers, the manufacturer, and clients, which raise the need for coordination and information sharing. This paper contributes to the discourse mainly by developing and resolving an integrated mathemat...

This paper presents a certified confidence model which aims to ensure credibility for information exchanged among agents which inhabit an open environment. Generally speaking, the proposed environment shows a supplier agent b which delivers service for a customer agent a. The agent a returns to b a cryptographed evaluation r on the service delivered. The agent b will employ R as testimonial whe...

We analyze a periodic-review inventory model where the decision maker can buy from either of two suppliers. With the first supplier, the buyer incurs a high variable cost but negligible fixed cost; with the second supplier, the buyer incurs a lower variable cost but a substantial fixed cost. Consequently, ordering costs are piecewise linear and concave. We show that a reduced form of generalize...

Reserve prices are commonly used in procurement auctions, and the logic is simple: They help the buyer avoid paying too much for the contract. The reserve price is set by the buyer before the auction based on the buyer’s knowledge about suppliers’ costs. In practice, buyers can refine their knowledge about suppliers’ costs through activities known in industry as cost modeling. In this paper we ...

In a buyer-supplier game, a distinguished player, called the buyer, wishes to purchase some combinatorial object. A set of players, called suppliers, offer pieces of the object for sale. In this paper, we provide a transformation from most combinatorial minimization problems to buyer-supplier games; a characterization of the core of buyer-supplier games in the transferable and non-transferable ...

In multimedia wireless networks, when a mobile host (MH) moves to a neighbor cell, it requests the base station (BS) to reserve the bandwidth for seamless handoff. The reservation scheme based on the fixed 2-tier cell structure was proposed to prevent the reservation requests from the MHs close to the BSs. In this reservation scheme, the BS requests the reservation only when the MH is outside o...