Reserch On The Supply Chain With Forecast Updates,Service Constraints And Asymmetric Information

Globalization and advances in information and production technologies have changed how companies design and deal with their supply chains.In this dissertation,we model and study two problems arising in supply chain management.In the first problem,we study a single-period two-stage service-constrained supply chain with an information update.We consider a supply chain which consists of one manufacturer and one buyer who faces a random demand.The buyer has two procurement opportunities with the second one after observing a market signal which updates the demand forecast.He also needs to satisfy certain service requirement in order to achieve high customer satisfaction.We study two kinds of service requirements with the first one having one service level constraint which is evaluated based on the updated customer demand,and the second one having two service level constraints,one at each stage.In the one-serviceconstraint case,in addition to the second procurement opportunity,the buyer may be allowed to cancel a part of the initial order at the second stage if required.We obtain the buyer's optimal ordering decisions at both stages,and discuss certain monotonicity properties in terms of the target service level.We also discuss the impact of the forecast quality on the optimal decisions.We show that the optimal first-stage order quantity may not be monotone with respect to information accuracy,as it is in the case without the service constraint.Finally,we discuss the supply chain coordination issue and find that the buy back contract,which has the same form as that derived in Donohue(2000),can also coordinate the supply chain in the presence of the service constraint.The coordinated order quantities,however,may differ from those in Donohue.In the two-service-constraint case,in stead of assuming the second-stage purchasing price is known and fixed at stage 1,we allow for a random purchasing price which is realized at stage 2.We characterize the optimal ordering policy at each stage and discuss the impact of the forecast quality.We also consider a multi-period problem with two ordering stages and two service constraints in each period.In the second problem,we study the contract designing issues in drop-shipping supply chains with asymmetric demand information.In such a chain,the retailer receives the customer's order and the supplier fills it.In the full demand information case,the supplier knows the demand faced by the retailer.In the asymmetric demand information case,it is not so.We propose a commitment-penalty contract that coordinates such a chain in the full demand information case.Then we focus on the contracting issue under asymmetric demand information.We show that the supplier can obtain the retailer's demand information by offering a menu of commitment-penalty contracts.Under this mechanism,we find the solution that maximizes the supplier's expected profit.