Blessing or Curse? The Bullwhip Effect of an Omni-Channel Supply Chain with Channel Interactions

Due to the more complex structure of the omnichannel supply chain, the variation and influencing factors of its bullwhip effect have aroused increasing scholarly attention.In this paper, we study omni-channel supply chains that include both online and offline channels and the demand for goods in the supply chain depends on a uniform price, which follows a first-order autoregressive process. We employ the minimum Mean Square Error forecasting method and order-up-to inventory to describe the replenishment process. We propose the consumer channel preference coefficient and demand interactivity to represent the channel interactions in omni-channel supply chains. We set up multiple scenarios to discuss the effect of interactions on the bullwhip effect of omni-channel supply chains and obtain the conditions that can reduce the bullwhip effect. Furthermore, from the manager's perspective, we give what characteristics of markets and items are more suitable for omni-channel retailing