Coping with Loss Aversion and Risk Management in the Supply Chain Coordination

In this paper, we apply a combined revenue sharing and buyback contract to investigate the channel coordination of a two-echelon supply chain with a loss-averse retailer. Since loss-averse decision makers usually take on more risks, the Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) measure is introduced to hedge against it and the retailer’s objective is to maximize the CVaR of utility. We obtain the retailer’s optimal order quantity under the combined contract. It is shown that there is a unique wholesale price coordinating the supply chain if the retailer’s confidence level is less than a threshold that is independent of contract parameters. Moreover, a complete sensitivity analysis of parameters is carried out. In particular, the retailer’s optimal order quantity and coordinating wholesale price decreases as the loss aversion or confidence level increases, while it increase as the buyback price or sharing coefficient increases. Furthermore, there exists the situation where the combined contract can coordinate the chain even though neither the revenue sharing nor buyback contract can when the contract parameters are constrained.

Effect of Additional Order in Two-Stage Supply Chain Contract under the Demand Uncertainty

In this work, mathematical models are formulated in order to investigate the effect of the additional order on the expected total profit of a two-stage supply chain. A multi-period buyback contract between a supplier and a retailer under the demand uncertainty is considered. Under the contract, an advance order is submitted to the supplier in advance when the demand is unknown, and an additional order can be made at the beginning of each period after the previous period demand is realized. The impact of the coordination on the supply chain’s expected total profit is also considered. The results show that the additional order does not always increases the supply chain profit. The additional order increases the supply chain profit only when both the retailer and supplier are coordinated. Under the decentralized system with the buyback contract, the retailer tends to order less in an advance order to reduce the risk. This leads to the higher cost due the additional order after the demand is realized. As a result, it is lowers the supply chain profit. Moreover, the sensitivity analysis is performed using numerical studies in order to observe the behavior of the expected total profit of the supply chain.

Trust-based cooperation in Silk Road Economic Belt countries: strategical ordering in the assembly supply chain

PurposeThis paper's purpose is to suggest that manufacturers strategically place soft orders for assembly materials with suppliers in Silk Road Economic Belt countries who probably doubt the realization of the soft orders placed.Design/methodology/approachFirst, a two-stage Stackelberg competition is constructed, taking into account the supplier's trust level in formulating the decision process in the assembly supply chain. The authors then provide a buyback contract to coordinate the supply chain, in which the manufacturer obtains enough supplies by sharing some of the perceived risks of not fully trusted suppliers. Furthermore, the authors conduct a numerical study to investigate the influence of trust under a decentralized case and a buyback contract.FindingsThe authors found that all supply chain partners in Silk Road Economic Belt countries experience potential losses due to not fully trusting certain conditions. The study also shows that, in Silk Road Economic Belt countries, operating under a buyback contract is better than being without one in terms of assembly supply chain performance.Research limitations/implicationsOn the one hand, the authors only consider the asymmetry of demand information without considering that of cost structure information. On the other hand, a natural extension of the paper is to integrate single-period transactions into the multi-period transaction problem setting. As all these issues require substantial effort, the authors reserve them for future exploration.Originality/valueDoing business with not-fully-trustworthy partners in Silk Road Economic Belt countries is risky, and this study reveals how trust works in global cooperation and with strategic reactions in situations of partial trust.

Research on the variable buyback contract

Purpose Based on the traditional buyback model, this paper aims to propose a new buyback method – the variable buyback contract – to solve the serious inventory backlog in the current economic situation. Design/methodology/approach In this paper, the authors further study the buyback problem in a two-level supply chain with uncertain demand. Such a problem can be found in many research papers, which also use the Stackelberg game model. They put forward many factors that affect the buyback price, including risk preference, random arrival of consumers, etc. Different from the existing research, the authors propose another factor that may affect supply chain buyback – the retailer's remaining inventory to study the buyback contract. Findings First, the authors found that under the variable buyback contract, there is an optimal retail price, wholesale price and an optimal range of parameter settings for the buyback price. Second, the proposed Pareto-optimal solution for system improvement can achieve supply chain coordination. Third, under some conditions, the variable buyback contract is better than the wholesale price contract and fixed-price buyback contract. Originality/value First, this is the first paper to discuss to measure the buyback price with the retailer's remaining inventory. Second, the proposed buyback contract can help decision-makers to choose the optimal improvement strategies. Third, this contract has a certain practical significance, which can effectively alleviate the current inventory backlog problem.

Coordination for pull and push contracts in decentralized system with uncertain supply

This paper investigates how a random supply can influence management decisions under pull and push contracts in a decentralized supply chain with one supplier and one retailer. We suppose that the supplier faces yield uncertainty, and we adopt game models to analyse the supply chain members’ decisions (i.e., wholesale price and order quantity) under the two commonly used contracts. Specifically, we analyse the revenue sharing mechanism and buyback mechanism with pull and push contracts, respectively, and find that the buyback contract can efficiently coordinate the supply chain with push contract, while the revenue sharing contract cannot improve the performance with a pull contract. Then we design a modified revenue sharing contract that introduces a subsidy for excess inventory and shows that for the pull case, the proposed mechanism can coordinate the supply chain effectively. Finally, the analysis results are displayed intuitively by numerical cases.