Various contracts can be designed to coordinate a simple supplier–retailer channel, yet the contracts proposed in prior research and tested in a laboratory setting do not perform as standard theory predicts. The supplier, endowed with all bargaining power, can neither fully coordinate the...

Supply chains today routinely use third parties for many strategic activities, such as manufacturing, R&D, or software development. These activities often include relationship-specific investment on the part of the vendor, while final outcomes can be uncertain. Therefore, writing complete...

Channel coordination using contracts is a topic that commanded a great deal of attention in the supply chain management literature. Several recent studies that tested the performance of coordinating contracts in the laboratory found that they fail to coordinate channels, and a major reason for...

Problem definition: To improve the poor performance of supply chains caused by misaligned incentives under the wholesale price contract, theory proposes coordinating contracts. However, a common finding of experimental studies testing such contracts is that they tend to yield only a marginal, if...