Research On Supply Chain Decision Model Based On Behavioral Factors

Supply chain is an effective form of business to deal with the economic situation in the highly competitive global economic integration, and supply chain management has also been being the research focus of academia. Most of the traditional supply chain management research applied expected utility theory to make supply chain decision-making models under uncertainty condition based on the "rational economic man", while ignored many complexities and uncertainties of the supply chain system, particularly human behavior and cognition. "Behavioral operations" derived from the fusion of behavioral factors and operation management provides a new opportunity to study the interaction between human behavior and cognition and supply chain system.In this dissertation, behavioral operations models are used to describe behavioral factors of decision-maker, and the impacts of behavioral factors on supply chain decision-making process are studied in different supply chain context. Loss aversion, expectation-based loss aversion and social preferences are focused on and supply chain decisions considered these behavioral factors are discussed.This dissertation introduces the research background, significance of this research, proposes the research objectives and research content, and illustrates the research methods and innovations.The second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth chapters are the body of this dissertation. The second chapter is the literature review of important theories and research which are closely related to this research, including supply chain management, game theory and its applications in supply chain, and behavioral supply chain.The third chapter studies the joint decision-making of order quantities and pricing for loss-averse retailers with the price-dependent demand which is affected additively or multiplicatively by a random term. Based on prospect theory, the expected utility function of loss-aversion retailer is expressed, and the expressions of optimal order quantities and pricing and its sufficient condition of existence are deduced. Finally, numerical examples are given to illustrate the theoretical results of the proposed models. It is also given that loss-aversion behavior makes retailer take conservative quantity polices that make order quantity is close to mean demand, and the loss-aversion behavior has an effect on optimal decisions and expected utility.The fourth chapter studies the inventory competition between expectation-based loss-averse newsvendors in a dyadic channel with a risk-neutral supplier and multiple expectation-based loss-averse newsvendors. The research shows there is an unique Nash equilibrium order quantity of the newsvendors if the supplier allocates the total demand among the newsvendors proportional to their order quantities. Furthermore, the total order quantity increases as the number of newsvendors increase or as the newsvendors become more expectation-based loss-averse. Based on above results, this dissertation shows the simple wholesale price contract can coordinate the supply chain when the number of expectation-based loss-averse newsvendors is above a special threshold.The fifth chapter studies supply chain contract coordination models in a two stage supply chain consisting of a risk-neutral supplier and an expectation-based loss-averse retailer. Based on expectation-based loss-aversion concept, the impact of retalier’s expectation-based loss-averse characteristic on different contracts including wholesale price contract, revenue sharing contract and buyback contract is revealed. Finally, a numerical example is given to illustrate the theoretical results of the proposed models.The sixth chapter incorporates social preferences in a dyadic channel in two different cases with social preference concerned supply chain member, where the supplier and the retailer negotiate about the wholesale price and order quantity by Nash-bargaining. This dissertation shows that there exists a Nash-bargaining equilibrium for the wholesale price and order quantity with equal and unequal bargaining power under special conditions and the order quantity is not affected by the social preference of the retailer or the social preference of the supplier, while the wholesale price increases as the retailer concerns the suppler more or the supplier concerns the retailer less. This dissertation then compares the game results between cooperative game and non-cooperative game and study the channel profit distribution between the two agents. Finally, numerical examples are given to illustrate the theoretical results of the proposed models.Finally, the dissertation concludes the research and proposes future research topics.