We consider a decentralized supply chain in which a downstream manufacturer purchases components from an upstream supplier privileged with private information about supply disruption risk. The supplier's initial reliability, asymmetric to the manufacturer, is either low or high. We examine two...

We study a two-period supply chain in which a manufacturer produces a product, learns to reduce cost, and sells it through a retailer with a price-dependent demand. The manufacturer's second-period production cost declines linearly in the first-period production with a random learning rate. 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...

This study investigates the strategic effect of return policies in a dual-channel supply chain, in which a manufacturer can sell products directly to end customers and indirectly via an independent retailer. The manufacturer decides whether to implement a return policy in either the direct or...

A nearly explicit feedback Stackelberg-Nash equilibrium is obtained in a dynamic distribution channel consisting of a manufacturer and two competing asymmetric retailers engaged in promoting the manufacturer's product to be sold through the retailers. The manufacturer decides on its support for...

We explore buyback contracts in a supplier-retailer supply chain where the retailer faces a price-dependent downward-sloping demand curve subject to uncertainty. We formulate the problem as a supplier-led Stackelberg game and derive explicitly the equilibrium contract parameters along with the...

We develop a general methodology for a partially observed stochastic control problem. The dynamics is governed by a discrete-time Markov process. We describe an application to an inventory system with possibility of shrinkage, and introduce unnormalized conditional probabilities to transform the...

In this paper we characterize the feedback equilibrium of a general infinite-horizon Stackelberg-Nash differential game where the roles of the players are mixed. By mixed we mean that one player is a leader on some decisions and a follower on other decisions. We prove a verification theorem that...