Hidden Supply Chain Risk and Incoterms®: Analysis and Mitigation Strategies

Among the many sources of financial and operational risk in supply chains are the Incoterms®, which are terms of trade used to decide who does what in a cargo movement, when risk passes from seller to buyer and who pays for which part of the movement. Wrong Incoterms® create unexpected costs or risks, at best, and inoperable contracts at worst, with all the challenges implied. This paper analyzes risk in supply chain management (SCM) through the lens of the responsibilities and costs imposed by Incoterms®. The authors also conducted a survey of 100 supply chain decision makers on supply chain contracts creation and Incoterms® knowledge in the population. Failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA) of Incoterms® reveals many scenarios that pose financial, operational, and even legal risk to firms. Results suggest Incoterms® rules are poorly understood by supply chain practitioners in general, are often chosen by personnel who are not aware of the implications of their choices, and are therefore frequently chosen incorrectly or non-strategically, thereby increasing cost and risk. This paper discusses the implications of the analysis and survey results on supply chain performance as well as mitigation strategies for practitioners in strategically using Incoterms® to remove cost, risk, and delay from supply chain transactions.

Effective Smart Contracts for Supply Chain Contracts

Blockchain is in its way of revolutionizing different sectors with its decentralized peer-to-peer networking. Smart contracts are the piece of software that have written rules to be executed automatically to update the state of the block chain in a systematic way. One of the main use of Smart contract is in Supply Chain management. Supply Chain management deals with lot of legal contracts at a time. Contracts are agreements between two or more parties that define the duties and obligations for execution of any kind of activities. In this research, we are trying to automate the supply chain related contracts by identifying the important entities such as contract type, start date, end date etc., by using Natural Language Processing methods, then convert the contract to smart contract. This provides an efficient template for creation of smart contracts from natural language contracts and thereby offer best smart contract template for a given type of contract in Supply Chain.

Contract Unobservability and Downstream Competition

Problem definition: In this paper, we consider a supply chain with a manufacturer and two retailers who are contracted through wholesale prices or two-part tariffs. We depart from the existing literature by assuming that contract terms between the manufacturer and a retailer are not observed by the rival retailer. Academic/practical relevance: Although the existing literature typically assumes that they are common knowledge in the market, contract terms may not be observed by rival retailers under certain circumstances. This paper contributes to the literature by studying the effect of contract unobservability on supply chain performance. Methodology: We use game-theoretical methods to find the equilibrium. When there are multiple equilibria, we adopt passive beliefs as an equilibrium-refinement criterion. Results: We find that certain established results regarding observable supply chain contracts do not always apply when those contracts become unobservable to competing retailers. In particular, compared with when using two-part tariff contracts, the manufacturer may benefit from using wholesale-price contracts when contract terms are unobservable. Moreover, the total industry profit may increase under wholesale-price contracts. Managerial implications: Our results offer an alternative explanation for the popularity of wholesale-price contracts and suggest that members of the supply chain must take unobservability into account when selecting the right contracts. We also offer new insights into buyback contracts and downstream mergers under unobservable contracts.

Bargaining Process and Channel Efficiency

The behavioral literature has demonstrated that the format of supply chain contracts matters even when theoretically it should not and that contracts that in theory coordinate channels fail to do so in laboratory experiments. The existing body of experimental evidence uses an ultimatum bargaining protocol to test analytical models, but there is no reason to think that bargaining in supply chains is in the form of ultimatum offers. We investigate the effect of bargaining on contract performance by extending the bargaining protocol to allow the manufacturer to make concessions. We test coordinating contract with bargaining in the laboratory by comparing wholesale price and the two-part tariff contracts using two different bargaining protocols. We then develop and estimate a statistical model of behavior with bargaining and find that this model organizes our data well. Our main finding is that the contracts that we study are more efficient when participants are allowed to make concessions. The additional channel efficiency is owing to more efficient offers made by manufacturers. The higher channel efficiency primarily benefits the retailer—the weaker party. Our main contribution is the observation that, when testing analytical models of contracts in the laboratory, the way that the bargaining process is implemented, such as the ability to make concessions, has a critical effect on conclusions. This paper was accepted by Vishal Gaur, operations management.

Joint Emission Reduction Strategy in Green Supply Chain under Environmental Regulation

Under the threat of global warming, joint emission reduction strategy has been widely adopted as an effective solution for the industry to guarantee environmental sustainability. In the practice of supply chain, environmental regulations and supply chain contracts are applied with the attempt to improve environmental performance. However, whether these measures are actually effective remains unanswered. In this paper, we study a supply chain with one manufacturer and one retailer adopting joint emission reduction strategy. We first investigate under what circumstance the environmental regulation can effectively result in higher emission reduction efforts. The result shows that when the cost coefficient satisfies certain conditions, the increase of penalty or subsidy can lead to more investment in emission reduction. In addition, if the environmental impact caused by the production process is extremely high, the enforcement of the regulation is ineffective. We also explore how the cost-revenue-sharing contract affects the emission reduction strategy and the coordination of the members in the supply chain. The results suggest that the incentive effect of environmental regulation is more effective when the supply chain coordination contract exists. Numerical experiments are also presented to verify our analytical conclusions.