Supply Chain Performance with Target-Oriented Firms

Problem definition: We study a supply chain in which a supplier sets the wholesale price and a retailer responds with an order quantity. Both of the two firms can be either risk-neutral—maximizing the expected profit—or target-oriented, which is to maximize her or his ability to reach a target profit. Academic/practical relevance: Our work not only sheds light on the benefit/loss of trading with target-oriented decision makers but also, adds new knowledge to the supply chain coordination literature. Methodology: We provide strong support for firms’ target-based preference and the linear target formation model through a survey as well as analyzing company data. With the firms’ target-oriented behavior evaluated by a CVaR-satisficing measure, we apply a game theoretical framework to investigate how the target-based preference affects supply chain performance. Results: A firm, be it a supplier or a retailer, is always hurt by its target-based preference but can benefit from its trading partner’s target-based preference. A risk-neutral supplier, for example, can sometimes reap the whole supply chain’s profit if the retailer is target-oriented, and a target-oriented supplier always performs better with a target-oriented retailer than a risk-neutral one. Furthermore, a target-oriented retailer and/or supplier can help alleviate the double-marginalization effect and with a specific target, can help the supply chain achieve the same efficiency level as in a risk-neutral centralized system, with just a wholesale price contract. Another important finding is that if both firms are target-oriented, then the supply chain can have a higher expected profit under a decentralized system than a centralized one. This contrasts with the case when both firms are risk-neutral. We also investigate the role of outside option and retailer-type misidentification and find that both can alleviate the retailer’s disadvantage of being target-oriented. Managerial implications: (i) The target-based preference can be exploited by the trading partner, and hence, a firm should adopt the target-oriented decision criterion with caution. (ii) A target-oriented retailer can explore strategies such as revealing his outside option or hiding his target-based preference in order to be less manipulated. (iii) Whether a firm (and the supply chain) can benefit from its trading partner’s target-based preference often depends on how ambitious the trading partner (and the firm itself if it is target-oriented) sets the target. (iv) Target-based preference of one or both firms can help the supply chain reach the first-best efficiency. (v) When both firms are target-oriented, decentralization can be preferred to centralization.

Sequential Procurement with Contractual and Experimental Learning

We study the design of sequential procurement strategies that integrate stochastic and strategic information. We consider a buyer who repeatedly demands a certain good and is unable to commit to long-term contracts. In each time period, the buyer makes a price offer to a seller who has private, persistent information regarding his or her cost and quality of provision. If the offer is accepted, the seller provides the good with a stochastic quality that is not contractible. Therefore, the buyer can learn from the (strategic) acceptance decisions taken by the seller and from evaluations of the (stochastic) quality delivered whenever a purchase occurs. Hence, the buyer not only faces a tradeoff between exploration and exploitation but also needs to decide how to explore: by facilitating quality experimentation or by strategically separating seller types. We characterize the perfect Bayesian equilibria of this sequential interaction and show that the buyer’s equilibrium strategy consists of a dynamic sequence of thresholds on his or her belief on the seller’s type. When only one seller type is more efficient than the buyer’s outside option, the buyer uses one form of information: either strategic or stochastic. If both seller types are more efficient, then the buyer uses both forms of information; at the early stages of the interaction, the buyer offers high prices that incentivize trade and quality experimentation, and after gathering enough information, the buyer may advance to offering low prices that partially separate seller types. We identify the effect strategic sellers have on the buyer’s optimal strategy relative to more traditional learning dynamics and establish that, paradoxically, when sellers are strategic, the ability to observe delivered quality is not always beneficial for the buyer. This paper was accepted by Victor Martínez-de-Albéniz, operations management.

Asymmetric Opportunities After an Unsuccessful Sports Career

Contestants enter a risky contest when pursuing a sports career or choose a secure outside option. If contestants enter this contest but their sports career fails, they may have asymmetric career opportunities outside of sport. Greater opportunities reduce the risk of entering this contest. However, contestants’ incentives to exert effort decrease. Two types of equilibria exist if the initial pool of contestants is large. Either only types with high opportunities or only types with low opportunities enter the sports contest. If the initial pool of contestants is low, both types of contestants participate in the contest.

Bargaining strategies for governance complex games

Global governance complexes offer member states opportunities for “regime shifting”: playing off an institutional forum against another with the goal of improving one’s relative bargaining position. I probe the internal validity of this strategy. The model makes two contributions to the governance complex literature. Formally, first, the analysis goes beyond current “outside-option” models of regime shifting, involving a permanent break of negotiations, to “inside-option” models, involving temporary disagreements. Substantively, second, the article models two scenarios of regime shifting, one that works for the weak and another that works for the powerful, and then “tests” the claim held by some in the literature that powerful countries are more likely to avail themselves of the possibility of regime shifting than weaker countries. I conclude that regime shifting is more likely to work for the weak than for the strong.

Attention Please!

We study the impact of manipulating the attention of a decision‐maker who learns sequentially about a number of items before making a choice. Under natural assumptions on the decision‐maker's strategy, directing attention toward one item increases its likelihood of being chosen regardless of its value. This result applies when the decision‐maker can reject all items in favor of an outside option with known value; if no outside option is available, the direction of the effect of manipulation depends on the value of the item. A similar result applies to manipulation of choices in bandit problems.

Robust sequential search

We study sequential search without priors. Our interest lies in decision rules that are close to being optimal under each prior and after each history. We call these rules robust. The search literature employs optimal rules based on cutoff strategies, and these rules are not robust. We derive robust rules and show that their performance exceeds 1/2 of the optimum against binary independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) environments and 1/4 of the optimum against all i.i.d. environments. This performance improves substantially with the outside option value; for instance, it exceeds 2/3 of the optimum if the outside option exceeds 1/6 of the highest possible alternative.

Screening in Vertical Oligopolies

A finite number of vertically differentiated firms simultaneously compete for and screen agents with private information about their payoffs. In equilibrium, higher firms serve higher types. Each firm distorts the allocation downward from the efficient level on types below a threshold, but upward above. While payoffs in this game are neither quasi‐concave nor continuous, if firms are sufficiently differentiated, then any strategy profile that satisfies a simple set of necessary conditions is a pure‐stategy equilibrium, and an equilibrium exists. A mixed‐strategy equilibrium exists even when firms are less differentiated. The welfare effects of private information are drastically different than under monopoly. The equilibrium approaches the competitive limit quickly as entry costs grow small. We solve the problem of a multi‐plant firm facing a type‐dependent outside option and use this to study the effect of mergers.

Fiscal Rules as Bargaining Chips

Most fiscal rules can be overridden by consensus. We show that this does not make them ineffectual. Since fiscal rules determine the outside option in case of disagreement, the opposition uses them as “bargaining chips” to obtain spending concessions. We show that under some conditions this political bargain mitigates the debt accumulation problem. We analyze various rules and find that when political polarization is high, harsh fiscal rules (e.g., government shutdown) maximize the opposition’s bargaining power and lead to lower debt accumulation. When polarization is low, less strict fiscal limits (e.g, balanced-budget rule) are preferable. Moreover, we find that the optimal fiscal rules could arise in equilibrium by negotiation. Finally, by insuring against power fluctuations, negotiable rules yield higher welfare than hard ones.