The Coordination Mechanisms And Modeling Of Supply Chain For A Short-Life-Cycle Product

We address the challenge in dealing with the short-life-cycle product that is characterized by the uncertain demand and the single-cycle with several selling periods, and study the decision behaviors of agents on supply chain under three representative operation settings according to the thought of progressive extension. For each setting, the behavior of a risk-neutral centralized supply chain is optimized in the expected profit as a benchmark, then a feasible contract is designed for the decentralized supply chain system consisted of one supplier and one retailer, which can motivate the agents who maximize their own expected profit respectively to make the same decisions as the centralized system does. Concretely, our contributions are as following: 1. THE SUPPLY CHAIN COORDINATION WITH THE COMBINED CONTRACT. According to the perfect competitive market, we consider the channel coordination question under the uncertain demand and the marketing mode of single-cycle and two-period selling. We depict the operation mode, where retailers sell the products with different marketing policies in different selling periods, with the stochastic dynamic programming model, and the Combined Contract (CC), a stimulant and risk-compensation mechanism, which can ensure the channel coordination, is presented for the decentralized system. Then, we prove that the expected profit function of the agent is concave on decision variables, and derive the necessary condition to achieve the optimal performance for the whole system. It is shown that the CC can ensure the channel coordination, and is flexible enough to arbitrarily allocate the coordination profit of system between the agents on the supply chain. With the CC, the profit allocation follows the fair rule in risk-market----the higher risk, the more expected profit, which helps the decentralized system to reach win-win. At the same time, the CC can also help the supplier strengthen his status in channel, and improve the retailer performance steadily. Furthermore, with the Mean-Variance method we illustrate the performance improvement of system with the CC under the risk-averse retailer. 2. THE COMBINED CONTRACT UNDER THE DEMAND DEPENDED PRICE. Discarding the assumption of the perfect competitive market, we consider the channel coordination question under the uncertain and price-elasticity demand and the marketing mode of single-cycle and two-period selling. The Combined Contract with Pending Prices (CCPP) is developed to achieve the channel coordination, and we prove that it can ensure the consistency in the jointed decisions of ordering and pricing for the decentralized retailer and for the whole system. Furthermore, to sum up the characteristics of the CC and the CCPP, a new coordination mechanism, Profit-Sharing Contract (PSC), is designed and it is proved that the PSC can ensure the system coordination under the above setting. Furthermore, it is shown that the CCPP takes the highlights of the CC, such as validity, flexible, fair, and win-win for two agents so on, and that the PSC is generalize and suitable to be operated under the perfect and non-perfect competitive market. 3. THE COMBINED CONTRACT UNDER THE TS DECISION MODE. According to the perfect competitive market, we consider the channel coordination question under the information updating and the marketing mode of single-cycle and two-period selling. With the Bayesian updating techniques, we develop the Two-Stage (TS) decision mode, which synthesize the demand observation before selling season to the retailer's second ordering decision and the supplier's second yielding decision, and present the optimal decision methods of agents. Then we compare the superiority of TS mode in ordering/yielding decision with the traditional QR mode. Furthermore, to the risk in the uncertain demand and the dropping price in the second selling period, the Combined Contract with Different Wholesales (CCDW) is designed to achieve the system coordination, and we depict it with the stochastic dynamic programming model, and develop its necessary...