In this paper, we study the contracting issues in an outsourcing supply chain consisting of a user company and a call center that does outsourcing work for the user company. We model the call center as a G/G/s queue with customer abandonment. Each call has a revenue potential, and we model the call center’s service quality by the percentage of calls resolved (revenue realized). The call center ...

In this paper, seller-buyer supply chain coordination with general side-payment contracts is introduced to gain the maximum possible chain profit. In our model, the logistics costs for both buyer and seller are considered and the final demand is also supposed to be a decreasing function of the retail price. Since parties aim to maximize their individual profits, the contractual parameters are s...

Agrifood firms in the modernizing/globalizing world, both in developing and developed countries, regularly need to undertake innovations. They develop supply chains to accommodate the nature of the innovations. In this paper we analyze an innovator’s supply chain design problem. The design of the supply chain may include allocating resources between production of feedstock (agricultural product...

In a supply chain organized as a network of autonomous enterprises, the main objective of each partner is to optimize his production and supply policy with respect to his own economic criterion. Conflicts of interests and the distributed nature of the decision structure may induce a global loss of efficiency. Contracts can then be used to improve global performance and decrease risks. The purpo...

University bookstores have a complex multi-product, multi-supplier supply chain with complex channel relationships such as product substitution, random yields, reverse logistics and returns, and risk sharing contracts. Supply chain efficiency is important to the bookstore due to low overall profit margin. The used book buyback activity is an example of reverse logistics with random yield with s...

This paper studies the coordination issue of a supply chain consisting of one retailer and two suppliers, amain supplier and a backup supplier. The main supplier’s yield is subject to disruption and the retailer faces a random demand. We determine the retailer’s optimal ordering policy and the main supplier’s production quantity that maximize expected profit of the centralized supply chain. We ...

Based on a supply chain framework, we study the stocking decision of a downstream buyer who receives private demand information and has the incentive to influence her capital market valuation. We first characterize a market equilibrium under a general, single buy-back contract. We show that the buyer’s stocking decision can be distorted in equilibrium. Such a downstream stocking distortion hurt...

Reducing inventory levels is a major supply chain management challenge in automobile industries. With the development of information technology new cooperative supply chain contracts emerge such as Vendor-Managed Inventory (VMI). This research aims to look at the literature of information management of VMI and the Internet of Things, then analyzes information flow model of VMI system. The paper...

Forecast sharing in a supply chain using linear price contracts often leads to inefficiencies as the buyer has an incentive to inflate demand forecasts to ensure sufficient supply. Recent research in supply chain contracting has focused on one-shot relationships, and has identified various contracts that align incentives in the supply chain and induce the buyer to reveal forecast information tr...