We model the impact of information visibility in a two-level supply chain consisting of independent retailers who share upstream supply. The manufacturer supplies similar products to the two retailers and each retailer serves its independent end market. Retailers face one period of demand and...

We study the ex ante incentives for firms to share their private information in a Cournot duopoly with capacity constraints. In both demand and cost information sharing games, we show that the incentives can be reversed when some equilibrium solutions are binding on capacity. Especially, we...

The authors conducted a series of structured interviews with managers of ten supermarket chains in Shanghai to compare supermarket business practices in Shanghai with those in the United States, emphasizing logistics management issues. Shanghai supermarkets tend to be smaller than U.S. stores,...

Increasing product variety through the use of alternate package sizes is a commonly observed mechanism in the grocery industry. Under such a scheme, however, the response to pricing decisions for each of the different package sizes is affected by how customers make demand choices. We build a...

The problem of sharing manufacturing, inventory, or capacity to improve performance is applicable in many decentralized operational contexts. However, the solution of such problems commonly requires an intermediary or a broker to manage information security concerns of individual participants....

We model a supply chain with two retail warehouses that place replenishment orders with a common manufacturing capacity. The two retailers differ in the variability of their order-streams. The order-stream from one retail warehouse is modeled as a Poisson process and from the other as a...

This paper develops and analyzes a principal-agent model for product specification and production motivated by Ücore buyingÝ decisions at an automobile manufacturer. The model focuses on two important elements of the ÜcoreÝ buyer's responsibility: (1) assessing the supplier's capability, and...

In this paper, we analyze demand postponement as a strategy to handle potential demand surges. Under demand postponement, a fraction of the demands from the "regular" period are postponed and satisfied during a "postponement" period. This permits capacity to be procured to satisfy the postponed...

A guaranteed time distribution system is organized so that movement of items between any source-destination pair (serviced by the system) is completed within a guaranteed period of time (T). Various express mail services are examples of such distribution systems. The movement of items between...

We model two separate, decentralized systems, each consisting of a warehouse and a production capacity. The demand processes experienced by the systems have different variabilities. The two decentralized systems consider an agreement to pool their production capacities. We examine the impact of...