We value the option of subcontracting to improve financial performance and system coordination by analyzing a competitive stochastic investment game with recourse. The manufacturer and subcontractor decide separately on their capacity investment levels. Then demand uncertainty is resolved and...

Process flexibility, whereby a production facility can produce multiple products, is a critical design consideration in multiproduct supply chains facing uncertain demand. The challenge is to determine a cost-effective flexibility configuration that is able to meet the demand with high...

This paper models a type of vendor-managed inventory (VMI) agreement that occurs in practice called a (z, Z) contract. We investigate the savings due to better coordination of production and delivery facilitated by such an agreement. The optimal behavior of both the supplier and the retailer are...

This paper considers a production-scheduling problem arising when there are random yields and demands as well as two sequential production periods before demand occurs. A typical instance is the production of seed corn. The paper makes three contributions. First, we verify that the objective...

In this paper we analyze the impact of supply-side externalities existing among downstream retailers on supply chain performance. Namely, multiple retail firms face stochastic demand, purchase the product from the upstream wholesaler, and make stocking decisions that affect all other retailers...

We consider a stochastic, capacitated production-inventory model in which the customer provides information about the expected timing of future orders to the supplier. We allow for randomness in customer order arrivals as well as the quantity demanded, but work under the assumption that the...

This paper examines the interactions between routing and inventory-management decisions in a two-level supply chain consisting of a cross-docking warehouse and N retailers. Retailer demand is normally distributed and independent across retailers and over time. Travel times are fixed between...

A returns policy, which specifies a schedule of rebates from manufacturer to retailer for product left over at the end of the selling season, encourages larger order quantities and can increase manufacturer profit. One downside from a manufacturer's perspective is the possibility of very low...

The third-party logistics industry has grown rapidly in recent years, accounting for $46 billion of the total $921 billion in logistics spending in the United States during 1999. This figure is expected to grow by 15 to 20% annually as manufacturing firms increasingly partner with third-party...

In this paper, we investigate price-only contracts in supply chain capacity procurement games. For a two-party supply chain, comprising a manufacturer and a supplier that both invest in capacity, we prove the existence of a class of coordinating price-only contracts that arbitrarily allocate the...