the joint economic lot sizing problem review and extensions with the growing focus on supply chain management firms realize that inventories across the entire supply chain can be more efficiently managed through greater cooperation and better coordination this paper presents a comprehensive and up to date review of the joint economic lot sizing problem jelp and also provides some extensions of this important problem in particular a detailed mathematical description of and a unified framework for the main jelp models are given additionally a comparative empirical study of the main policies proposed for jelp is conducted the focus of this study is on assessing the deviation of these policies from the optimal solution studying the performance of different models provides additional insights that will help in justifying their use in more complex supply chain models that involve more stages or other practical considerations of interest

optimal pricing shipment and payment policy for an integrated supplier buyer inventory model with two part trade credit abstract in this article we develop an integrated supplier buyer inventory model with the assumption that the market demand is sensitive to the retail price and the supplier adopts a trade credit policy the trade credit policy discussed in this paper is a two part strategy cash discount and delayed payment that is if the buyer pays within m1 the buyer receives a cash discount otherwise the full purchasing price must be paid before m2 where m 2 m 1 0 the objective of this research is to determine the optimal pricing ordering shipping and payment policy to maximize the joint expected total profit per unit time an iterative algorithm is established to obtain the optimal strategy furthermore numerical examples and sensitivity analysis are presented to illustrate the results of the proposed model and to draw managerial insights

joint economic procurement production delivery policy for multiple items in a single manufacturer multiple retailer system abstract this paper proposes an analytical model to effectively integrate and synchronize the procurement production and delivery activities in a supply chain consisting of a single raw material supplier a single manufacturer and multiple retailers the manufacturer produces multiple items on a single facility utilizing common raw material under a common rotation cycle policy of not incurring shortages at any retailers this problem is formulated as a variant of the classical economic lot scheduling problem the objective is to find the production sequence of multiple items the common production cycle length and the delivery frequencies and quantities that minimize the average total cost an efficient heuristic algorithm is presented to solve the proposed problem through numerical tests we show that the proposed heuristic gives quite satisfactory solutions

source diversification and import price risk in this article i present a theoretical framework and derive an empirical model that relates import price risk to the allocation of an import across exporting sources source diversification a differential approach to expected utility theory and firm demand is used to derive a model comparable to more popular demand systems such as the rotterdam and aids models the model is used in estimating carnation demand in the united kingdom results show that while total carnation imports expected prices and seasonality are important determinants of import demand by source there is significant information loss when price risk is not considered copyright 2012 oxford university press

optimal ordering and transfer policy for an inventory with stock dependent demand abstract this paper deals with an ordering transfer inventory model to determine the retailer s optimal order quantity and the number of transfers per order from the warehouse to the display area it is assumed that the amount of display space is limited and the demand rate depends on the display stock level the objective is to maximize the average profit per unit time yielded by the retailer the proposed models and algorithms are developed to find the optimal strategy by retailer numerical examples are presented to illustrate the models developed and the sensitivity analysis is also reported

note comment on a generalized quantity discount pricing model to increase supplier s profits lee and rosenblatt lee h l m j rosenblatt 1986 a generalized quantity discount pricing model to increase supplier s profits management sci 32 9 1177 1185 considered the joint problem of ordering and offering discount by a supplier to his sole buyer the objective of the supplier being to induce the buyer to alter his order quantities in order to increase the supplier s yearly profit they determined the optimal ordering and pricing policy for the supplier under the constraint on the amount of discount offered to the purchaser this restriction on the amount of price discount seems unreasonable when the objective of the supplier in all likelihood is to increase his own profits it is possible that higher discounts in purchase price may lead to greater economies for the supplier in this note a much simpler approach is being offered for determining the optimal ordering and pricing policy for the supplier

on risk aversion and bargaining outcomes abstract we revisit the well known result that asserts that an increase in the degree of one s risk aversion improves the position of one s opponents to this end we apply yaari s dual theory of choice under risk both to nash s bargaining problem and to rubinstein s game of alternating offers under this theory unlike under expected utility risk aversion influences the bargaining outcome only when this outcome is random namely when the players are risk lovers in this case an increase in one s degree of risk aversion increases one s share of the pie

a generalized quantity discount pricing model to increase supplier s profits in this paper the joint problem of ordering and offering price discount by a supplier to his sole major buyer is analyzed the objective is to induce the buyer to alter his order schedule and size so that the supplier can benefit from lower set up ordering and inventory holding costs we generalize the quantity discount pricing model of monahan monahan j p 1984 a quantity discount pricing model to increase vendor profits management sci 30 6 720 726 to 1 explicitly incorporate constraints imposed on the amount of discount that can be offered and 2 relax the implicit assumption of a lot for lot or order for order policy adopted by the supplier an algorithm is developed to solve the supplier s joint ordering and price discount problem

optimal strategy for an integrated system with variable production rate when the freight rate and trade credit are both linked to the order quantity abstract this paper presents an integrated inventory model with variable production rate and price sensitive demand rate the buyer s purchases trade credit linked to the order quantity offered by the supplier in addition the buyer pays the freight charge according to a weight schedule this paper attempts to offer a best policy that aims at maximizing the joint total profit while the trade credit and freight rate are simultaneously linked to the order quantity the same policy also incorporates considerations on the optimal retail price order quantity and delivery decision we provide possible solutions for the buyer and the supplier to collaboratively agree on inventory control warehouse management transportation logistics delivery and billing our study demonstrates that significant profit increase for the entire supply chain can be achieved by linking both trade credit policy and freight rate policy to order quantities an algorithm is furnished to determine the optimal solution in addition numerical examples and sensitivity analysis are presented to illustrate the theoretical results

import price uncertainty and the distribution of income in this paper we estimate oil and nonoil import demand functions for the united states under the assumption that import prices are uncertain both import demand functions are formally derived from an expected utility maximization problem treating imports as inputs to the technology the model allows us to test for risk aversion and to assess the impact of uncertainty on the volume of imports gross output and the distribution of income we find that uncertainty leads to a reduction in welfare imports and gross output moreover it hurts labor relatively much more than capital the impact of uncertainty however is found to be quite small

the volatility of australian traded goods prices it is generally accepted that the australian economy is continually subject to unanticipated shocks particularly unexpected swings in the prices of australia s internationally traded goods this article empirically investigates the nature and extent of volatility in import and export prices faced by the australian production sector it estimates multivariate garch models of the stochastic processes generating the prices of imports and exports and of important components of exports and imports this article proposes an index of volatility which is used to provide a summary measure of the extent of volatility in a multivariate context the overall conclusion is that the price growth rates for australia s traded goods exhibit considerable time variation in volatility and that these price growth rates are highly and positively correlated with each other

stock wars inventory competition in a two echelon supply chain with multiple retailers this paper studies the competitive and cooperative selection of inventory policies in a two echelon supply chain with one supplier andn retailers stochastic demand is monitored continuously retailers incur inventory holding and backorder penalty costs the supplier incurs holding costs for its inventory and backorder penalty costs for backorders at the retailers the latter cost reflects the supplier s desire to maintain adequate availability of its product to consumers previous research finds the supply chain cost minimizing reorder point policies the cooperative solution the competitive solution is a nash equilibrium a set of reorder points such that no firm can deviate from the equilibrium and lower its cost it is shown that nash equilibria exist and a method is presented to find all of them in some settings the cooperative solution is a nash equilibrium competition does not necessarily lead to supply chain inefficiency in other settings competition leads to costs that are substantially higher than optimal usually but not always the competitive supply chain carries too little inventory three cooperation strategies are discussed change incentives change equilibrium and change control a set of contracts is provided that changes the firms incentives so that the optimal policy is a nash equilibrium an equilibrium change can improve performance but does not guarantee optimal performance to change control the firms let the supplier choose all reorder points a key component in vendor managed inventory that change leads to optimal supply chain performance

optimal strategy for the integrated vendor buyer inventory model this note is concerned with the integrated vendor buyer inventory model two different strategies have been proposed in the literature for the problem one where the delivery quantity to the buyer at each replenishment is identical and another strategy where at each delivery all the inventory available with the vendor is supplied to the buyer we show that there is no one strategy that obtains the best solution for all possible problem parameters we also present the results of a detailed numerical study that analyses the relative performance of the two strategies for various problem parameters

competitive and cooperative policies for the vendor buyer system abstract this paper considers a model for decentralized dynamic production distribution control we examine the situation where a vendor produces a product in a batch production environment and supplies it to a buyer under deterministic conditions some conditional games for the vendor and the buyer are defined the games are indexed by numbers of shipments acceptable to both players before the strategies competition begins a construction of nash equilibrium strategies is given in the proof of the existence theorem goyal s numerical example is used to compare our equilibrium solutions with relatively optimal policies in the cooperative case

an approach for developing an optimal discount pricing policy this paper addresses the problem of why and how a seller should develop a discount pricing structure even if such a pricing structure does not alter ultimate demand the situation modeled is most appropriate where the seller s product does not represent a major component of the buyer s final product where the demand for the product is derived or where the price is only one of many factors considered in making a purchase decision a model of buyer reaction to any given pricing scheme is developed to show that there exists a unified pricing policy which motivates the buyer to increase its ordering quantity per order thereby reducing the joint buyer and seller ordering and holding costs as a result the seller is able to reduce its costs while leaving the buyer no worse off and often better off the model is extended to handle variable ordering and shipping costs and situations where the seller faces numerous groups of buyers each having different ordering policies finally a case study is presented explicitly showing how the proposed pricing policy can be applied to the situation of a large seller selling to a number of different buyer groups

a bargaining model with asymmetric information for a single supplier single buyer problem abstract banerjee s joint economic lot size jels model represents one approach to minimizing the joint total relevant cost of a buyer and a supplier by using a joint optimal order and production policy the implementation of a jointly optimal policy requires coordination and cooperation should the buyer have the market power to implement his own optimal policy as that one to be used in the exchange process no incentive exists for him to choose a joint optimal policy a joint policy can therefore only be the result of a bargaining process between the parties involved the supplier may make some sort of concession such as a price discount or a side payment in order to influence the buyer s order policy a critical assumption made throughout in supply chain literature is that the supplier has complete knowledge about the buyer s cost structure clearly this assumption will seldom be fulfilled in practice the research presented in this paper provides a bargaining model with asymmetric information about the buyer s cost structure assuming that the buyer has the power to impose its individual optimal policy

the single vendor single buyer integrated production inventory model with a generalised policy abstract this note considers a more general type of policy for the single vendor single buyer integrated production inventory model than has hitherto been presented based on successive shipments to the buyer within a single production batch increasing by a fixed factor

note comments on a quantity discount pricing model to increase vendor profits monahan monahan j p 1984 a quantity discount pricing model to increase vendor profits management sci june 720 726 adapted the quantity discount model of inventory theory to the problem of determining an optimal quantity discount schedule from a vendor s point of view and opened up an important direction of research however his one item one customer one vendor model is based on several implicit assumptions that must be judged unreasonable monahan must account for the vendor s inventory carrying charges and redefine his variable s2 it is shown that a rational vendor s manufacturing frequency would not be identical to the buyer s ordering frequency if the vendor s manufacturing setup costs are substantially larger than the buyer s ordering costs a numerical example presented in this note also questions the practical usefulness of monahan s model even after its theoretical inaccuracies axe corrected monahan s model may explain discounts that are a fraction of 1 of the price of an item but it fails to explain commonly observed magnitudes of quantity discounts such as 10 of the unit price

using nash bargaining to design project management contracts under cost uncertainty abstract in the design of procurement contracts cost sharing wherein the contractor receives a fixed fee plus a fraction of his cost is common when the cost for completing the project is uncertain we determine the best cost sharing contract between a risk neutral project manager and a risk averse contractor when negotiation proceeds in accord with nash bargaining we examine the characteristics of the contract when the contractor can invest to reduce the mean and or the uncertainty of the project cost we show that cost plus contracts dominate fixed price contracts as well as all other cost sharing contracts in order to extend our analysis to the case when the value of the project itself is uncertain we employ the recent method of embedded nash bargaining finally we generalize our main result by allowing an asymmetric nash bargaining solution

international trade and exchange rate volatility for currencies with well developed forward markets several papers have investigated the conjectured negative relationship between trade and short term exchange rate volatility without being very successful a theoretical explanation for the empirical anomalies is provided by solving explicitly for the forward rate because importers and exporters are on opposite sides of the forward market so is their exposure towards exchange rate volatility moreover which trade flow benefits and which one loses from increased volatility is determined by the signs of the aggregate net foreign currency exposure and the aggregate measure of risk aversion

nash bargaining and risk aversion it is widely accepted among axiomatic bargaining theorists that if one bargainer is more risk averse than a second the second will be a tougher bargaining opponent than the first against all opponents we argue that this relationship between risk aversion and bargaining toughness is both highly fragile and more nuanced than previously articulated in the nash and kalai smorodinsky bargaining frameworks we establish that when a bargainer is compared with a second who is almost globally more risk averse than the first the supposedly immutable relationship between bargaining effectiveness and risk aversion evaporates specifically we identify an upper hemicontinuity failure of a correspondence which maps the power set of all lotteries to those utility pairs that satisfy our almost global comparative risk aversion relation on these subsets we trace the consensus view that tougher bargainers are less risk averse to an exclusive focus on precisely the point at which this correspondence implodes

exchange rate uncertainty and foreign trade abstract this paper starts with reviewing the existing literature on exchange rate uncertainty and trade flows it then argues that potential costs of medium term uncertainty in exchange rates and competitiveness are likely to be much larger than that of exchange risk which has been the focus of the existing literature two measures of medium term exchange rate uncertainty are constructed one is a weighted function of the magnitude of past movements in nominal exchange rates and the current deviation of the exchange rate from equilibrium while the second depends on both the duration and the amplitude of misalignment from equilibrium exchange rates the empirical evidence reported in the paper suggests that when exchange rate uncertainty is defined over a medium term period it does affect adversely trade flows of the industrial countries under review with the notable exception of the united states

fair transfer price and inventory holding policies in two enterprise supply chains abstract a key issue in supply chain optimisation involving multiple enterprises is the determination of policies that optimise the performance of the supply chain as a whole while ensuring adequate rewards for each participant in this paper we present a mathematical programming formulation for fair optimised profit distribution between echelons in a general multi enterprise supply chain the proposed formulation is based on an approach applying the nash bargaining solution for finding optimal multi partner profit levels subject to given minimum echelon profit requirements the overall problem is first formulated as a mixed integer non linear programming minlp model a spatial and binary variable branch and bound algorithm is then applied to the above problem based on exact and approximate linearisations of the bilinear terms involved in the model while at each node of the search tree a mixed integer linear programming milp problem is solved the solution comprises inter firm transfer prices production and inventory levels flows of products between echelons and sales profiles the applicability of the proposed approach is demonstrated by a number of illustrative examples based on industrial processes

models of joint economic lot sizing problem with time based temporary price discounts abstract in this research we develop mathematical models of joint economic lot sizing problem jelp in a situation when a supplier offers time based temporary price discounts to a buyer during a sale period to respond this the buyer places a special order with higher quantity in literature it has been assumed that the buyer tends to place the special order at the end of the sale period we relax this assumption by considering the time when the buyer places the special order during the sale period i e the sooner the special order took place the higher discount received in our proposed models called joint economic lot sizing problem with time based temporary price discounts jelptpd we devide the sale period into k phases the buyer must place the special order in one of these phases the highest discount will be given when the special order is placed at the first phase while the lowest one will be given when it is placed at the k th phase there are two cases discussed the first case is when the sale period is uniformly divided while the second case is when the sale period is proportionally divided following some rules our numerical experiments showed the behavior of the buyer to respond the temporary price discount offers in major experiments the buyer shifted the decision on placing the special order in the earlier phases instead of the end of the sale period

the effects of real exchange rate risk on international trade abstract by assuming real profit maximization and uncertain prices as well as exchange rates we conclude that it is uncertain percentage changes in the real exchange rate that are risky in international trade empirical estimation of fourteen bilateral trade flows among industrialized countries finds a significant negative effect on trade quantity from such risk in a number of these cases the expectation variable has a positive effect in a larger number of cases significant price effects from the expectation variable are fewer and from risk are negligible

different time preferences and non stationary contracts in negotiations abstract when time preferences differ non stationary contracts strictly dominate stationary contracts the unique equilibrium converges to the nash bargaining solution in which the less patient player always receives 50 of his utopia payoff regardless of the difference between the players discount rates

an integrated vendor buyer inventory model with quality improvement and lead time reduction abstract the success of the japanese in the employment of just in time jit production has received a great deal of attention in the past two decades the underlying goal of jit is to eliminate wastes which can be achieved through various efforts such as shortening lead time and improving quality recently yang and pan 2004 just in time purchasing an integrated inventory model involving deterministic variable lead time and quality improvement investment international journal of production research 42 5 853 863 have studied the effects of lead time reduction and quality improvement investment on an integrated inventory model the objective of this study is to extend yang and pan s 2004 model by allowing for shortages and using the reorder point as a decision variable that is this article develops an integrated inventory model which jointly determines the optimal order quantity reorder point process quality lead time and the frequency of deliveries simultaneously analytical results that characterize the exact optimal policy for the problem described above are devised to develop efficient and optimal computational procedures furthermore a numerical example is given to illustrate the results

an operational policy for a three stage distributive supply chain system with retailers backorders abstract this research deals with a production inventory problem consisting of three stage tree type single producer multi distributor and multi retailer supply chain network where a model has been developed for achieving the lowest total cost for operating a supply chain system with allowable shortage in this research the shortage is assumed to occur in a form of backorder the refrigerator manufacturing can suitably be used to illustrate the scenario which makes the situation more rational and realistic by assumptions the customers will not go somewhere else the cost of lost sale is not included in this case the total cost of this tree type distributive supply chain system is comprised of setup costs and holding costs at all echelons and the backorder cost at retailer level only a replenishment policy is sought to operate the system at a minimum cost the problem is formulated as an unconstrained mixed integer programming problem and a newly developed doubly hybrid meta heuristic algorithm is adopted as the solution procedure the solutions which determine the desired replenishment policy for the producer distributors and retailers are obtained to minimize the total system cost a sensitivity analysis is performed to evaluate the outcome of the proposed solution procedure presented in this research numerical results are generated to demonstrate the solution procedure and future research is indicated for further study

an exact policy for enhancing buyer supplier linkage in supply chain system abstract kim s l and ha d 2003 a jit lot splitting model for supply chain management enhancing buyer supplier linkage international journal of production economics 86 1 10 proposed a novel cooperative method for synchronizing supply with actual customer demand in a just in time scenario however all decision variables obtained using their model may not be integers making it difficult to be implemented in fixed cycle applications i e a planning horizon of one time period in addition their model can only be used to solve joint optimization for single buyer and single supplier furthermore problems arise when resource constraints are added to their model because traditional inventory models do not allow constraints to be added by the decision maker arbitrarily to improve the practical utility of the model of kim and ha 2003 we derive a mixed integer optimization approach which not only can be applied to the joint optimization for the multi buyer and single supplier but also all decision variables obtained are executable integers for the planning horizon of one time period to suit real world situations infinite planning horizon scenario is also considered in this study in addition illustrative examples are included to demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed models in which the integrated purchase policy being superior to independent optimization can be clearly seen moreover the analytical superiority of the proposed models in terms of execution time can be seen through a computational experiment conduced on a set of logical number of buyers in the multi buyer and single supplier problem finally the performance of various approaches i e proposed models and genetic algorithm is also examined to provide valuable insight into the practical problem

non cooperative strategies for production and shipment lot sizing in one vendor multi buyer system abstract this paper considers a decentralized dynamic production distribution control a discrete deterministic model in which a vendor produces a product and supplies it to the buyer is considered several papers on vendor buyer integrated production inventory management assume that policies are set by a central decision maker to optimize total system performance although vendor and buyer may agree to minimize the total cost at least one of them has a private incentive to deviate from the agreement in the competitive situation the objective is to determine schedules which minimize the individual average total cost of production shipment and stockholding we assume that the division of shipment costs is centrally coordinated or negotiated initially it leads to a class of non cooperative constrained games indexed by two parameters connected with partitions of shipment costs non cooperative strategies are considered as feasible strategies in a restricted non cooperative game some properties of equilibrium strategies are investigated as acceptable equilibrium strategies of subgames in the game

production theory technological change and the demand for imports aggregate import demand functions for switzerland 1948 1976 are estimated jointly with the supply and or demand functions for domestic outputs and inputs joint estimation not only yields more efficient estimates than single equation methods but it also ensures that the derived demand and supply functions are consistent with the underlying technology two specifications are examined one of them stressing the smallness and openess of the swiss economy as well as its flexible immigration policy the generalized leontief functional form is used in both cases special attention is devoted to the interpretation of the estimated price elasticities and various hypotheses of technological change are tested for

multi buyer discount pricing abstract this article gives an exact optimal solution to the problem of finding the optimal discount price and price break quantity for a seller dealing with one buyer it also gives a method for solving the problem when one seller offers a single quantity discount schedule to many buyers the discount is of the all quantity type and the model of the cost structure was originally proposed by crowther

a one vendor multi buyer integrated inventory model abstract we consider a one vendor multi buyer integrated inventory model the vendor seeks to minimize his total annual cost subject to the maximum costs which buyers are prepared to incur in order to implement this model the vendor only needs to know buyer s annual demand and previous order frequency which can be inferred from buyer s past ordering behavior we find the optimal solution for the one vendor one buyer case and present a heuristic approach for the one vendor multi buyer case

an incremental discount pricing schedule with multiple customers and single price break abstract this paper analyzes how a supplier can formulate the terms of a quantity discount pricing schedule assuming a single incremental discount system a model is developed from which an algorithm is derived for an optimal discount schedule the cases are investigated in which both the discount rate and the break point are unknown and either one is prescribed a numerical example is presented to illustrate the algorithm developed

prudence in bargaining the effect of uncertainty on bargaining outcomes abstract we investigate the outcome of bargaining when a player s pay off from agreement is risky we find that a risk averse player typically increases his equilibrium receipts when his pay off is made risky this is because the presence of risk makes individuals behave more patiently in bargaining strong analogies are drawn to the precautionary saving literature we show that the effect of risk on receipts can be sufficiently strong that a decreasingly risk averse player may be better off receiving a risky pay off than a certain pay off

the effect of decision weights in bargaining problems abstract bargaining problems are considered where the preferences of the bargainers deviate from expected utility but can be modelled according to rank dependent utility theory under rank dependent utility both the utility function and the probability weighting function influence the risk attitude of a decision maker the same definition of risk aversion leads to two forms of risk aversion utility risk aversion and probabilistic risk aversion the main finding is that these two forms can have surprisingly opposite consequences for bargaining solutions that exhibit a weak monotonicity property in particular in a large class of bargaining problems both increased utility risk aversion and decreased probabilistic risk aversion of the opponent are advantagous for a player this is demonstrated for the kalai smorodinsky bargaining solution the nash bargaining solution does not behave regularly in this respect

optimal production and shipment models for a single vendor single buyer integrated system abstract this paper develops a more general production inventory model for a single vendor single buyer integrated system unlike the hitherto existing production inventory models for the vendor buyer system the present model neither requires the buyer s unit holding cost greater than the vendor s nor assumes the structure of shipment policy secondly the model is extended to the situation with shortages permitted based on shortages being allowed to occur only for the buyer thirdly the paper also presents a corresponding production inventory model for a deteriorating item for the integrated system the solution procedures are provided for finding the optimal production and shipment policies and illustrated with numerical examples three significant insights are shown 1 no matter whether the buyer s unit holding cost is greater than the vendor s or not the present model always performs best in reducing the average total cost as compared to the hitherto existing models 2 if the buyer s unit holding cost is less than the vendor s the optimal shipment policy for the integrated system will only comprise shipments with successive shipment sizes increasing by a fixed factor it is different from that obtained by hill hill r m 1999 the optimal production and shipment policy for the single vendor single buyer integrated production inventory problem international journal of production research 37 2463 2475 for the opposite case 3 when designing a single vendor single buyer integrated system making the buyer s unit holding cost lower than the vendor s is more beneficial to the system if shortages are not permitted to occur otherwise it just reverses

an optimal batch size for integrated production inventory policy in a supply chain abstract this study presents a new integrated production inventory policy under a finite planning horizon and a linear trend in demand we assume that the vendor makes a single product and supplies it to a buyer with a non periodic and just in time jit replenishment policy in a supply chain environment the objective is to minimize the joint total costs incurred by the vendor and the buyer in this study first we develop a mathematical model and prove that it has the optimal solution then we describe an explicit solution procedure for obtaining the optimal solution finally we provide two numerical examples to illustrate both increasing and decreasing demands in our proposed model and we show that the performance of the integrated consideration is better than the performance of any independent decision from either the buyer or the vendor

note on a quantity discount pricing model to increase vendor profits monahan monahan james p 1984 a quantity discount pricing model to increase vendor profits management sci 30 june 720 726 develops a model for establishing an optimal quantity discount schedule from a vendor s viewpoint in this note we show that this model is limited to the case where the vendor buys from another supplier incorporating vendor s inventory carrying costs we develop a generalized version of monahan s model and demonstrate its equivalence with the joint economic lot size approach suggested by banerjee banerjee avijit 1986 a joint economic lot size model for purchaser and vendor decision sci 17 summer 292 311

a comparison of different quantity discount pricing policies in a two echelon channel with stochastic and asymmetric demand information abstract in this paper we study quantity discount pricing policies in a channel of one manufacturer and one retailer the paper assumes that the channel faces a stochastic price sensitive demand but the retailer can privately observe the realization of an uncertain demand parameter the problem is analyzed as a stackelberg game in which the manufacturer declares quantity discount pricing schemes to the retailer and then the retailer follows by selecting the retail price and associated quantity proposed in the paper are four quantity discount pricing policies regular quantity discount fixed percentage discount incremental volume discount and fixed marginal profit rate discount optimal solutions are derived and numerical examples are presented to illustrate the efficiency of each discount policy

effects of a demand curve s shape on the optimal solutions of a multi echelon inventory pricing model abstract when a price demand relationship is needed in inventory pricing models very often a convenient typically linear function is arbitrarily chosen the common wisdom implication is that any downward sloping demand curve would lead to similar conclusions this paper applies different demand curve functions to a simple inventory pricing model and shows that while the common wisdom implication is valid for a single echelon system assuming different demand curve functions can lead to very different results in a multi echelon system in some situations a very small change in the demand curve appearance leads to very large changes in the model s optimal solutions other significant but counter intuitive effects of the demand curve form are also revealed this paper does not completely resolve the difficulties revealed by the counter intuitive effects reported here but establishing the existence of these effects represents a first step towards developing procedures to handle such effects these procedures will be necessary to ensure the reliability of many multi echelon models for products having price sensitive demands

an examination on the cost efficiency of the banking industry under multiple output prices uncertainty this article formulates a behavioural model of profit maximization which explicitly incorporates both multiple output prices risk and safety first practice this theoretical model is specifically suitable for investigating financial institutions whose output prices frequently encounter a variety of risks such as loan defaults arrears the sample banks are empirically found to be highly risk averse furthermore risk preferences exert little effect on the technical efficiency estimates whereas the same estimates obtained by the standard fixed effect model under certainty tend to be overestimated evidence is found that a specialized bank offering a single product with a larger scale of production will be preferable in an uncertain atmosphere

quality improvement and setup reduction in the joint economic lot size model abstract the co maker concept has become accepted practice in many successful global business organizations this fact has resulted in a class of inventory models known as joint economic lot size jels models heretofore such models assumed perfect quality production on the part of the vendor this paper relaxes this assumption and proposes a quality adjusted jels model in addition classical optimization methods are used to derive models for the cases of setup cost reduction quality improvement and simultaneous setup cost reduction and quality improvement for the quality adjusted jels numerical results are presented for each of these models comparisons are made to the basic quality adjusted model results indicate that all three policies exhibit significantly reduced total cost however the simultaneous model results in the lowest cost overall and the smallest lot size this suggests a synergistic impact of continuous improvement programs that focus on both setup and quality improvement of the vendor s production process sensitivity analysis indicates that the simultaneous model is robust and representative of practice

environmental performance impacts of vendor buyer coordination abstract effective coordination is a hallmark of successful supply chain management without such coordination vendors and buyers will act independently to make decisions that optimize their own objectives e g maximize their respective profits or minimize their costs this non coordinated approach is unlikely to be optimal when one considers the supply chain as a whole most vendor buyer coordination research concentrates only on an objective of minimizing total system costs but with the increasing environmental awareness in business and the general public many organizations acknowledge that strategies and practices which incorporate environmental considerations are essential to acquire a competitive advantage the objectives of this research are concerned not only with the economic impact of vendor buyer coordination on the organizations involved but also with the wider effects on society such as the effects of pollution on the environment this research demonstrates how to effectively incorporate environmental issues into vendor buyer coordination first we study the impacts of cost minimizing vendor buyer coordination models on environmental performance when compared with independent non coordinated optimization second we develop a single vendor multi buyer coordination model that includes both costs and environmental performance measures in its objective function a numerical example and a real case study show how both the total system cost and the environmental performance can be simultaneously improved

a single vendor single manufacturer integrated inventory model with stochastic demand and variable production rate abstract this paper investigates an alternative way to react to demand uncertainty in an integrated inventory model namely the variation of the production rate that enables the manufacturer to reduce lead times and the corresponding demand uncertainty to investigate the impact of variable production rates on the supply chain this paper considers a single vendor single manufacturer integrated inventory model where the vendor ships finished products in multiples of full truckloads to the manufacturer the objective of the model is to coordinate both production and distribution of the product in such a way that the total costs of the supply chain are minimized a solution procedure is suggested and the behaviour of the model is analysed in numerical examples obviously the total supply chain cost is reduced when the manufacturer s production rate is included as a decision variable in the model these savings can generally benefit both the vendor and the manufacturer however in situations where coordinated decision making is initially not beneficial to the vendor the supply chain members can benefit from a revenue sharing contract that supports the sharing of the total savings the model proposed in the paper at hand supports both the determination of an optimal production rate as well as the distribution of coordination benefits among the supply chain members

a genetic algorithm for optimal operating parameters of vmi system in a two echelon supply chain abstract this paper deals with the operational issues of a two echelon single vendor multiple buyers supply chain tsvmbsc model under vendor managed inventory vmi mode of operation the operational parameters to the above model are sales quantity and sales price that determine the channel profit of the supply chain and contract price between the vendor and the buyer which depends upon the understanding between the partners on their revenue sharing in order to find out the optimal sales quantity for each buyer in tsvmbsc problem a mathematical model is formulated optimal sales price and acceptable contract price at different revenue share are subsequently derived with the optimal sales quantity a genetic algorithm ga based heuristic is proposed to solve this tsvmbsc problem which belongs to nonlinear integer programming problem nip the proposed methodology is evaluated for its solution quality furthermore the robustness of the model with its parameters which fluctuate frequently and are sensitive to operational features is analysed

optimizing the economic lot size of a three stage supply chain with backordering derived without derivatives abstract multi stage supply chain management integration provides a key to successful international business operations this is because the integrated approach improves the global system performance and cost efficiency the integrated production inventory models using differential calculus to solve the multi variable problems are prevalent in operational research this paper extends the integrated vendor buyer inventory problem by yang and wee yang p c wee h m 2002 the economic lot size of the integrated vendor buyer system derived without derivatives optimal control applications and methods 23 163 169 to solve the multi variable problems in the supply chain and simplifies the solution procedure using a simple algebraic method as a result the solution procedure may be easily understood and applied so as to derive the optimal solution

supply chain coordination perspectives empirical studies and research directions supply chains sc are generally complex and are characterized by numerous activities spread over multiple functions and organizations which pose interesting challenges for effective sc coordination to meet these challenges sc members must work towards a unified system and coordinate with each other a systematic literature review is presented in this paper to throw light on the importance of sc coordination the objectives of this paper are to report and review various perspectives on sc coordination issues understand and appreciate various mechanisms available for coordination and identify the gaps existing in the literature a framework is suggested indicating scope for further research

risk aversion in the nash bargaining problem with risky outcomes and risky disagreement points according to this paper the analysis of the nash bargaining problem with risky outcomes must include the cases where the disagreement outcome itself is risky as well thus one generalizes the roth and rothblum results to models with risky disagreement outcome as well it turns out that their result will depend in some cases upon the degree of change in risk aversion particularly when the potential agreement has an outcome which makes player 2 worse off compared to the disagreement and if the disagreement does not dominate that outcome i e its support contains a worse outcome then when player 2 becomes sufficiently more risk averse player 1 becomes better off thus one obotains that increase in risk aversion may be disadvantageous to player 2 even if the risky disagreement is preferred to some outcome of the risky agreement

optimal production inventory policy for an integrated multi stage supply chain with time varying demand abstract an integrated multi stage supply chain with time varying demand over a finite planning horizon is considered in this paper the objective is to devise the optimal production inventory policy to minimize the total operational cost the model is formulated as a mixed integer nonlinear programming problem the problem is represented as a weighted directed acyclic graph the global minimum total operational cost is computed in polynomial time by the developed algorithm two numerical examples of a seasonal product and a product over its life cycle are studied to illustrate the results a sensitivity analysis of the system parameters is conducted to assist the supply chain decision makers

the impact of imports on the demand for labor in australia abstract in this paper we examine the impact of imports disaggregated by origin on the australian demand for labor contrary to widely accepted stylized facts we find evidence that imports from east asia and the pacific stimulate labor demand