| Supply chain environment is usually complex and volatile.First,there are various factors affecting supply chain environment,e.g.,the development of technologies,the formation of global market,changes of political and social environment,and nature disasters.Then,many elements in supply chains can be affected by environment,such as demand,retail price,and production cost.The enterprises in supply chains cooperate on behalf of their interests.They should work with each other in harmony,but the complex environment causes conflicts in supply chains.Based on the above background,this study focuses on the supply chain coordination problem when the environment is complex and volatile.Specifically,this paper studies supply chain coordination problems under demand surge,production cost uncertainty and price uncertainty.Changes of technology environment have brought new challenges to supply chains.Internet technology and mobile communication technology boomed e-commerce,and created new promotion modes.When the e-commerce platform conducts big price promotions,huge demand is generated.But huge demand results in many problems,e.g.,many late delivered goods,low service quality,high return rate,etc.,in spite that carriers make an effort to increase their delivery capacities temporarily.To circumvent this difficulty,this study considers a supply chain consisting of an online retailer,who can set price to influence the demand,and a capacitated express firm,whose capacity can be expanded at a high cost.The optimal decisions in the centralized and decentralized decision systems with deterministic and random demands are derived,and the study compares the performances of the two systems.The results show that,contrary to the traditional channel,the online retailer in the decentralized system may set lower price.Besides,the carrier has less incentive to expand capacity in the decentralized system when the market scale is huge,which underlines the need for coordination.In addition,coordination contracts to improve the overall performance of the supply chain under deterministic and random demands are proposed.This is the first study to consider the coordination problem in a supply chain consisting of an online retailer and a carrier.The complex and volatile environment can cause fluctuations in production cost.It is always long from signing contracts to production,thus the production cost is unknown at the time of contracting.Production cost uncertainty causes some problems in supply chains.This paper considers a supply chain consisting of a manufacturer and a retailer,where the unit production cost is uncertain when the firms sign a procurement contract.The results show that production cost uncertainty increases the incentive conflict in the supply chain.The classical coordinating contracts rely heavily on the production cost.When the production cost is unknown,they fail to coordinate the supply chain.Then this study designs an incomplete contract,which sets a wholesale price and an order quantity in the first stage,which the firms can re-negotiate after the production cost is realized in the second stage.Such an incomplete contract can lead to the first best outcome.Furthermore,the results reveal that the hold-up problem is prone to occur with improper contract incompleteness,re-negotiation freedom,and residual control rights.This is the first study involving contract incompleteness in supply chain coordination.The complex and volatile environment can also cause the fluctuations in the retail prices for many products,e.g.,agricultural products and energy products.It is often long from signing contracts to product selling.Thus,the selling price of a product is uncertain when signing contracts.The uncertainty might even make a retailer disrupted.This study constructs a two-period supply chain model to solve the problem.The cases with and without disruption are analyzed.Then this study considers compensation contract in the supply chain.By comparing the results in different cases,the study finds that the retailer disruption always hurts the manufacturer’s profit despite that the disruption happens to the retailer directly.Disruption is also detrimental to the whole supply chain.Nevertheless,the negative effects of disruption to the manufacturer and the supply chain can be alleviated by compensation contract.Besides,there are two counterintuitive results:(a)disruption might be beneficial to the retailer;(b)compensation may harm to the retailer although the retailer gets helps when it encounters disruption under compensation contract.Then a coordination contract is proposed,which requires the retailer to share some benefits of high market price.This study differs from previous studies by considering price uncertainty and retailer disruption. |
