Competitive contract design in a retail supply chain under demand uncertainty
File(s)Naval Research Logistics - 2023 - Anderson.pdf (1.25 MB)
Published version
Author(s)
Anderson, Edward
Jiang, Houyuan
Shao, Lusheng
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
This article studies the design of contracts involving a single retailer and multiple competing manufacturers who supply substitutable products. We consider a retail context in which contracts with manufacturers are negotiated relatively infrequently and signed before the demand environment is known, and the retail prices are determined when the demand is known. We develop a Stackelberg model to study the retailer's product selection and pricing decisions and the manufacturers' contract design decisions. We show that it is optimal for each manufacturer to offer a contract with nonlinear prices so that total payments are the total production cost plus a fixed additional cost. In the case of two manufacturers this result allows us to characterize an equilibrium in which the retailer's choice maximizes the supply chain profit, each manufacturer makes a profit equal to its marginal contribution to the supply chain, and the retailer takes the remaining profit. We also find that while increasing demand correlation always benefits the retailer, it benefits the manufacturers only when the production costs are convex. In an extension it is found that our equilibrium continues to hold when the retailer's reservation profit is below a threshold, but the competition dynamics may change when the reservation profit is above the threshold. Finally, we show that the equilibrium results remain true for the case with more than two manufacturers under a submodularity property, which holds in the case of quadratic costs and linear demand.
Date Issued
2023-10-01
Date Acceptance
2023-04-18
Citation
Naval Research Logistics, 2023, 70 (7), pp.691-707
ISSN
0894-069X
Publisher
Wiley-Blackwell
Start Page
691
End Page
707
Journal / Book Title
Naval Research Logistics
Volume
70
Issue
7
Copyright Statement
© 2023 The Authors. Naval Research Logistics published by Wiley Periodicals LLC. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided
the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.
the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.
Publication Status
Published
Date Publish Online
2023-05-03