Research On Retailer Dominance Of Two-echelon Supply Chain For Single-period Product

Variability of the retail-market demand, severity of the market competition, and rapid development and widespread application of information technology have made single-period products (such as perishable goods, short useful-life products, and fashion goods) more important in the supply chain management. The single-period products are higher uncertain and hard to be controlled in the business, therefore, the supply chain members will suffer more risks. Because the retailer directly faces to the retail-market, so it is easy to grasp the information of customer's demand for the retailer; as a result, the balance of power between manufacturers and retailers is shifting in industries as diverse as Pharmaceuticals, consumer packaged goods, hardware, apparel, and furniture. Furthermore, the increasing demand uncertainty makes the traditional technologies and tools of supply chain management not match the requirement of the market competition, the new supply chain that more strengthens cooperation among the supply chain members has more life force and competitive advantages, and in fact, cooperation is also an important approach to reply to demand uncertainty.According to the above background analysis, this thesis examines the retailer's dominance in a two-echelon supply chain, in which a single-period product is produced and sold, and analyzes the demand uncertainty, the sensitivity of retailer's order quantity to manufacturer's wholesale price, and/or other supply chain parameters how to affect the supply chain's optimal decisions and retailer's dominance. Five research questions are mainly addressed in this thesis:1. How to define and measure the retailer dominance for a decentralized supply chain?2. How to determine the optimal decisions for the supply chain cooperation in the environment of demand uncertainty?...