This research studies the competition between two coexisting suppliers in a two-echelon supply chain. The suppliers have different inventory cost structures (holding cost and setup cost). Each supplier offers one type of the two substitutable products to multiple buyers. Buyers’ preferences between the substitutable products differ. Each buyer has a particular order profile (order frequency and...

T his paper studies an outsourcing problem where two service providers (suppliers) compete for the service contract from a client. The suppliers face uncertain cost for providing the service because they do not have perfect information about the client’s type. The suppliers receive differential private signals about the client type and thus compete under asymmetric information. We first charact...

Business-to-business (B2B) electronic commerce has become an important issue in the debate about electronic commerce. How should the intermediary charge suppliers and buyers to maximize profits from such a marketplace? We analyze a monopolistic B2B marketplace owned by an independent intermediary. The marketplace exhibits two-sided network effects where the value of the marketplace to buyers is...

Suppliers face increasing pressure from their customers to improve their environmental performance. When firms downstream in the supply chain seek to achieve such improvements themselves, they frequently request that their suppliers adopt greener practices. This paper investigates the rationale for suppliers to comply with or resist the mandate of their customers to adopt the international envi...

Collusion between suppliers in reverse auctions may damage buyers’ benifits and then lower efficiency of resource allocation. Under first-price sealed-bid reverse auction mechanism, suppliers' equilibrium bidding strategy and buyers' revenue loss was analyzed considering collusion. Then some general conclusions were given: suppliers' bidding strategy is relevant to some factors such as valuatio...

Recently, sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) has become one of the important subjects in the industry and academia. Supplier selection, as a strategic decision, plays a significant role in SSCM. Researchers use different multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) methods to evaluate and select sustainable suppliers. In the previous studies, evaluation is solely based on the desirable feature...

Nowadays, managing a supply chain is turned to be one of the fundamentals of business process.  In doing so, investigating and analyzing each and every of the processes and selecting the best of each process is an important challenge for strategic managers. In this paper Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) technique is used and a model is provided for selecting the best suppliers with flexible inpu...

A blockchain-based power transaction method is proposed for Active Distribution Network (ADN), considering the poor security and high cost of a centralized trading system. Firstly, decentralized blockchain structure ADN built information kept in blocks. Secondly, needs between users suppliers ADN, an energy request mechanism proposed, optimization objective function designed by integrating awar...

Collusion between suppliers in reverse auctions may damage buyers’ benifits and then lower efficiency of resource allocation. Under first-price sealed-bid reverse auction mechanism, suppliers' equilibrium bidding strategy and buyers' revenue loss was analyzed considering collusion. Then some general conclusions were given: suppliers' bidding strategy is relevant to some factors such as valuatio...

This paper analyses data from surveys of 1400 first-tier automotive suppliers in Europe, the United States and Japan, conducted as part of MIT's International Motor Vehicle Program. The paper shows that the nature of supplier relations in the three regions is converging in some respects towards closely-linked voice relationships. The diffusion of voice relationships in Europe and the USA appear...