A Dynamic Game of Operations and Marketing Management in a Supply Chain

The aim of the paper is to study some important differences between (classical) non-cooperative and (modern) cooperative supply chain management. For this purpose, the paper develops a differential game model involving operations and marketing activities that are performed by a manufacturer and a retailer in a simple two-member supply chain. We consider a particular single brand of the manufacturer. The manufacturer decides on production volume, production process improvement and national advertising efforts, while the retailer decides her purchase volume by the manufacturer and her pricing policy toward the final consumers. A revenue sharing contract is employed in the non-cooperative setting. Among the issues addressed on the manufacturer side are the trade-off between production and process improvement activities, the path of inventory over time, and the trade-off between attracting new customers and improving the loyalty of current customers. For the retailer we study the inventory and price evolution over time