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...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

A supply chain system is studied, in which the information about the retailer’s storage cost is usually asymmetric. This paper studies the inventory control in the system and presents a quantity discount pricing model for inventory coordination based on the standard container, a transport tool from the supplier to the retailer with a fixed size. First, it investigates the inventory models under...

Determining an order quantity when quantity discounts are available is a major interest of material managers. A supplier offering quantity discounts is a common strategy to entice the buyers to purchase more. In this paper, EOQ models with incremental discounts and either full or partial backordering are developed for the first time. Numerical examples illustrate the proposed models and solutio...

In this paper, the coordination of pricing and periodic review inventory decisions in a supplier-retailer supply chain (SC) is proposed. In the investigated SC, the retailer faces a stochastic price dependent demand and determines the review period, order-up-to-level, and retail price. On the other hand, the supplier decides on the replenishment multiplier. Firstly, the decentralized and centra...