This study considers a supply chain that consists of n retailers, each of them facing a newsvendor problem, and a supplier. Groups of retailers might increase their expected joint profit by joint ordering and inventory centralization. However, we assume that the retailers impose some level of stock that should be dedicated to them. In this situation, we show that the associated cooperative game...

This paper demonstrates that an important role of intermediaries in supply chains is to reduce the ®nancial risk faced by retailers. It is well known that risk averse retailers when faced by the classical single-period inventory (newsvendor) problem will order less than the expected value maximizing (newsboy) quantity. We show that in such situations a risk neutral distributor can o€er a menu o...

Retailers are now the dominant partners in most supply systems and have used their positions to re-engineer operations and partnerships with suppliers and other logistic service providers. No longer are retailers the passive recipients of manufacturer allocations, but instead are the active channel controllers organizing supply in anticipation of, and reaction to consumer demand. This paper ref...

Menu costs, or price adjustment costs, refer to the total cost of changing the price of a product, which includes the physical cost of making the change as well as the managerial cost of making the price change decision. Prior work has presumed that online retailers face no menu costs, potentially leading to Bertrand competition and the Law of One Price. However, little empirical evidence exist...

Slotting allowances are a relatively recent trend, particular to the retail food industry. These allowances are lump-sum, up-front transfer payments from manufacturer to retailer when the manufacturer launches a new product. The practice has attracted some scrutiny because of uncertainty about its purposes and consequences. We draw from the extant literature to identify factors that potentially...

We study a supply chain with one supplier and many retailers that face exogenous endcustomer demands. The supplier and the retailers all try to minimize their own inventory-related costs. In contrast to the retailers’ newsvendor type ordering behavior (under which retailers may place orders freely in every period), we propose two scheduled ordering policies: Scheduled Balanced Ordering Policy (...

Emerging technologies enable customers to define by themselves through which channels they would like to interact with retailers. These technologies also enable retailers to emancipate from traditional channels, to offer services anytime and anywhere, and eventually to evolve into omni-channel retailers. In fact, most interactions between customers and retailers are enabled by information techn...

Tobacco smoking and exposure to secondhand smoke are major environmental risk factors that negatively influence health. It is recommended that tobacco product manufacturers and retailers receive empowerment counseling programs to achieve adolescent health targets. The present study conducted an empowerment counseling session to counsel tobacco product retailers in refusing to sell tobacco produ...

E-commerce is a fast growing channel for new business in China. However, Chinese small retailers have many difficulties in ecommerce applications nowadays, such as lack of IT skills, expensive of operation cost, etc. In this paper we present an intelligent retail system named eIRS which can help small retailers to implement their e-commerce strategies. eIRS whose single terminal entity looks li...

This paper analyses the sources of buyer power and its e¤ect on sellers’ investment in quality improvements. In our model retailers make takeit-or-leave-it o¤ers to a producer and each of them obtains its marginal contribution to total pro…ts (gross of sunk costs). In turn, this depends on the rivalry between retailers in the bargaining process. Rivalry increases when the retailers are less di¤...