Outsourcing Strategy Of A Supply Chain With Random Allocation Under Cost Information Asymmetry

This paper develops game models for a decentralized supply chain with a retailer and a manufacturer,where the manufacturer sells his product to the retailer with the random allocation and the retailer faces the random demand,and investigate channel the optimal equilibrium solution of the channel members by means of optimization theory and information mechanism design principles of game theory.Besides a regular production run,the manufacturer can outsource part of the retailer's order to a backup supplier,while the backup supplier is privileged with private information about the outsourcing production cost.Two outsourcing contracts,i.e.,price-only contract and information disclosure contract,can be employed by the manufacturer.We find that only when the allocation quantity to the retailer's order is low enough can the outsourcing business be used.For both contracts,the manufacturer decides the outsourcing quantity and lead time according to both capacity allocation and outsourcing cost type.Unlike the price-only contract,the information disclosure contract endows the manufacturer with the ability of revealing the true outsourcing cost information,and therefore it can improve the manufacturer's outsourcing performance due to the less procurement cost.However,we find that the manufacturer may not always gain more total expected profit from the information disclosure contract compared with the price-only contract.Meanwhile,the information disclosure contract may make the efficiency of decentralized supply chain even worse.This thesis consists of five chapters.In the first chapter,we introduce the research background of this paper,and current situation of the development of asymmetric information.The second chapter briefly introduces the knowledge of game theory and principal agent model.In the third chapter,we study the optimal equilibrium solution of supply chain channel members under the outsourcing contracts.In the fourth chapter,we give some numerical examples to illustrate the conclusions obtained in the third chapter.The last chapter makes a summary and outlook for the thesis.