control and enforcement in order to increase supplier inventory in a jit contract abstract prompt response to customer demand has long been a point of major concern in supply chains inventory wars between suppliers and their customers are common owing to cases in which one supply chain party attempts to decrease its stock at the expense of the other party in order to ensure that suppliers meet their commitments to fulfill orders on time customers must formulate incentives or alternatively enforce penalties this paper deals with a customer organization that has a contract with a supplier based on just in time strategy initiating a policy of sanctions the customer becomes the lead player in a stackelberg game and forces the supplier to hold inventory which is made available to the customer in real time using a class of sanctioning functions we show that the customer can force the supplier to hold inventory up to some maximal value rendering actual enforcement of sanctions unnecessary however contrary to expectations escalation of the enforcement level can in fact reduce the capacity of the supplier to replenish on time consequently the customer must sanction meticulously in order to receive his inventory on time having the possibility to devote a few hours each day to sanctioning activity significantly reduces the customer s expected cost in particular numerical examples show that the customer s costs under an enforcement level may be only 2 percent higher than his costs in a situation in which all inventory is necessarily replenished on time

managing supply uncertainty under supply chain cournot competition abstract we study the cournot competition between two supply chains that are subject to supply uncertainty each supply chain consists of a retailer and an exclusive supplier which has random yield we examine how the levels of supply uncertainty and competition intensity affect the equilibrium decisions of ordering quantity contract offering and centralization choice we show that a retailer should order more if its competing retailer s supply becomes less reliable or if its own supply becomes more reliable a supply chain with reliable supply can take great advantage of the high supply risk of its competing chain furthermore for decentralized chains we characterize the optimal wholesale price contracts with linear penalty under different supply risks and competition scenarios finally we show that supply chain centralization is a dominant strategy and it always makes the customers better off nevertheless if the supply risk is low and the chain competition is intensive centralization could actually decrease the supply chain profit compared with the case where both chains do not choose centralization this results in a prisoner s dilemma on the other hand if the supply risk is high and or the competition level is low centralization always increases the supply chain profit the desirability of supply chain centralization is enhanced by high supply uncertainty or low chain competition

supply chain coordination for the joint determination of order quantity and reorder point using credit option abstract decisions regarding order quantity and reorder point are two major challenges in supply chain inventory management in this paper a coordination model of the joint determination of these two decision variables is proposed a decentralized supply chain consisting of one buyer and one supplier in a multi period setting is investigated demand and lead times are uncertain in our model an incentive scheme based on credit option has been developed to encourage the buyer to participate in the coordination model in this model the downstream member has the option of using credit to purchase goods during the credit time subject to its commitment to a jointly agreed order quantity and reorder point the credit time is determined in such a way that the two parties have incentives to participate the proposed incentive scheme can share the benefits of coordination between the two members based on their bargaining power the proposed model shows that the coordination of the reorder point together with order quantity can increase the overall chain profitability as well as each member s profitability

the competitive newsboy we consider a competitive version of the classical newsboy problem in which a firm must choose an inventory or production level for a perishable good with random demand and the optimal solution is a fractile of the demand distribution and investigate the impact of competition upon industry inventory a splitting rule specifies how initial industry demand is allocated among competing firms and how any excess demand is allocated among firms with remaining inventory we examine the relation between equilibrium inventory levels and the splitting rule and provide conditions under which there is a unique equilibrium our most general result is that if all excess demand is reallocated i e there is perfect substitutability then competition never leads to a decrease in industry inventory

estimating labour market transitions and continuations using repeated cross sectional data abstract this paper proposes a population cohort approach for estimating labour market continuations or transitions using repeated cross sectional data this approach allows for the construction of consistent standard errors that account for the full variability of cross sectional data

distributed consensus in noncooperative inventory games this paper deals with repeated nonsymmetric congestion games in which the players cannot observe their payoffs at each stage examples of applications come from sharing facilities by multiple users we show that these games present a unique pareto optimal nash equilibrium that dominates all other nash equilibria and consequently it is also the social optimum among all equilibria as it minimizes the sum of all the players costs we assume that the players adopt a best response strategy at each stage they construct their belief concerning others probable behavior and then simultaneously make a decision by optimizing their payoff based on their beliefs within this context we provide a consensus protocol that allows the convergence of the players strategies to the pareto optimal nash equilibrium the protocol allows each player to construct its belief by exchanging only some aggregate but sufficient information with a restricted number of neighbor players such a networked information structure has the advantages of being scalable to systems with a large number of players and of reducing each player s data exposure to the competitors

a robustness study of a multi echelon inventory model via simulation abstract this paper examines the robustness of a standard model of multi echelon inventory systems specifically the models discussed in axsater oper res 48 5 2000 686 a simulation model was developed to explore the model s ability to predict system performance for a two echelon one warehouse multiple retailer system using r q inventory policies under conditions that violate the model s fundamental modeling assumptions in particular the impact of non stationary demand on this stationary demand inventory model was examined the model performs well at the low demand and large retailer order batch size situations but our testing of the model indicated that care must be taken when applying this model to situations that violate its fundamental assumption these results should help practitioners to better understand the assumptions of these models and to determine when or when not to apply these models in practice

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

the source of the new canadian job stability patterns this paper explores the causes of the recent change in the canadian job stability patterns using the labour force survey master files 1977 2008 i find that what was previously seen as a cyclical increase in job stability is actually a secular change results indicate that the ageing of the workforce the increased educational attainment and the increased labour force attachment of women play important roles in explaining the aggregate job stability patterns that emerge for education the declining importance of low educated workers is the key and not the rising importance of workers with university degrees with respect to gender the evidence points towards a cohortbased explanation surprisingly the changing industry structure has little explanatory powers finally only the rising educational attainment matters for newer jobs leaving a large part of the increase still unexplained

contracting and information sharing under supply chain competition we investigate contracting and information sharing in two competing supply chains each consisting of one manufacturer and one retailer the two supply chains are identical except they may have di

94 effective policies for a two stage serial inventory system with stochastic demand a two stage inventory system is considered where poisson demand occurs at stage 1 and stage 1 replenishes its inventory from stage 2 which in turn orders from an outside supplier with unlimited stock each shipment either to stage 2 or to stage 1 incurs a fixed setup cost under the assumption that the supply leadtime at stage 2 is zero we characterize a simple heuristic policy whose long run average cost is guaranteed to be within 6 of optimality i e a 94 effective policy the paper also provides heuristic policies for more general inventory systems and reports computational results

spiraling down into corruption a dynamic analysis of the social identity processes that cause corruption in organizations to grow to date theory and research on corruption in organizations have primarily focused on its static antecedents this article focuses on the spread and growth of corruption in organizations for this purpose three downward organizational spirals are formulated the spiral of divergent norms the spiral of pressure and the spiral of opportunity social identity theory is used to explain the mechanisms of each of these spirals our dynamic perspective contributes to a greater understanding of the development of corruption in organizations and opens up promising avenues for future research

coordination mechanisms of supply chain systems supply chain management scm has become an important management paradigm as supply chain members are often separate and independent economic entities a key issue in scm is to develop mechanisms that can align their objectives and coordinate their activities so as to optimize system performance in this paper we provide a review of coordination mechanisms of supply chain systems in a framework that is based on supply chain decision structure and nature of demand this framework highlights the behavioral aspects and information need in the coordination of a supply chain the identification of these issues points out several directions of future research in this area

competitive and cooperative inventory policies in a two stage supply chain we investigate a two stage serial supply chain with stationary stochastic demand and fixed transportation times inventory holding costs are charged at each stage and each stage may incur a consumer backorder penalty cost e g the upper stage the supplier may dislike backorders at the lower stage the retailer we consider two games in both the stages independently choose base stock policies to minimize their costs the games differ in how the firms track their inventory levels in one the firms are committed to tracking echelon inventory in the other they track local inventory we compare the policies chosen under this competitive regime to those selected to minimize total supply chain costs i e the optimal solution we show that the games nearly always have a unique nash equilibrium and it differs from the optimal solution hence competition reduces efficiency furthermore the two games equilibria are different so the tracking method influences strategic behavior we show that the system optimal solution can be achieved as a nash equilibrium using simple linear transfer payments the value of cooperation is context specific in some settings competition increases total cost by only a fraction of a percent whereas in other settings the cost increase is enormous we also discuss stackelberg equilibria

a note on price discount based on early order commitment in a single manufacturer multiple retailer supply chain abstract early order commitment eoc is a strategy for supply chain coordination wherein the retailer commits to purchasing from a manufacturer a fixed order quantity a few periods in advance of the regular delivery lead time in this paper we formulate and analyze the eoc strategy for a decentralized two level supply chain consisting of a single manufacturer and multiple retailers who face external demands that follow an autocorrelated ar 1 process over time we characterize the special structure of the optimal solutions for the retailers eoc periods to minimize the total supply chain cost and discuss the impact of demand parameters and cost parameters we then develop and compare three solution approaches to solving the optimal solution using this optimal cost as the benchmark we investigate the effectiveness of using the wholesale price discount scheme for the manufacturer to coordinate this decentralized system we give numerical examples to show the benefits of eoc to the whole supply chain examine the efficiency of the discount scheme in general situation and provide the special conditions when the full coordination is achieved

batch size and stocking levels in multi echelon repairable systems in multi echelon repairable inventory systems with high set up cost for order and or high demand rates the use of batch ordering may be more cost effective than the common s 1 s ordering policy this paper addresses the issue of determining the optimal order batch size and stocking levels at the stocking locations in such a system a power approximation is used to estimate the total system stock and backorder levels from which the optimal batch size can be readily determined a search routine involving one pass searches are then followed to obtain the stocking levels at the depot and the local sites of the system this procedure has been evaluated using 900 test cases and has been found to be very effective the power approximation approach also results in a simple analytical relationship to test whether or not s 1 s is an optimal ordering policy for repairable items in a multi echelon environment

both sides of the coin motives for corruption among public officials and business employees the aim of this study is to better understand why public officials and business employees engage in corruption insight into individual level explanations for corruption was obtained with the aid of a self report survey the results suggest that the most indicative factors of whether or not individuals are corruption prone are as follows the moral conviction they have to refrain from corruption perceptions of whether their colleagues approve of and engage in corruption and difficulties experienced in complying with the rules on corruption this result pattern was identical for public officials and business employees alike and as a consequence for both sides of corrupt acts the latter indicates that the same motives may not only underlie corruption in both private and public sectors but also the act of corruption in its active and passive forms the results of the current study do not provide strong support for the assumption that economic considerations expected costs and benefits are crucial in predicting corruption based on the findings that norms and the perceived opportunity to comply are dominant factors in explaining corruption this article focuses on the practical implications for the development of anti corruption strategies within both public and private sectors

product availability in competitive and cooperative dual channel distribution with stock out based substitution abstract this paper investigates the impact of customers stock out based substitution on the product availability and the channel efficiency of a dual channel supply chain which consists of a supplier distributing a single product to customers through both its wholly owned direct channel and an independent retailer the supplier and its retailer with the objective of optimizing their own profit simultaneously choose their own base stock level to satisfy the stochastic demand from the customers whose channel preferences are heterogeneous and may be affected by each channel s product availability the customers dynamically substitute between the two channels in the event of a stock out the result shows that the effect of the stock out based substitution may increase or decrease the efficiency of a decentralized supply chain it is found that while the integrated supplier retailer may consolidate the base stock levels to benefit from stock out based substitution the independent supplier and retailer are more inattentive to customers stock out based substitution thus the competitive base stock levels of the decentralized dual channel supply chain rarely agree with the system optimal levels various contracts are examined to shed light on channel coordination mechanisms in addition it is shown that the channel efficiency of the dual channel distribution can be improved by the emergence of stackelberg leadership from either the supplier or the retailer

decentralized inventory control in a two component assembly system abstract we investigate a two component assembly system facing stationary stochastic demand with constant component replenishment lead times holding cost are charged for each component inventory which are managed by component suppliers final product demand is backordered when cannot be fulfilled in time and a penalty cost is charged we assume the long lead time component supplier takes normal base stock policy while the short lead time component supplier takes a modified base stock policy static game and stackelberg games are considered equilibria are analyzed and the cost in equilibria are compared with the system optimal solution difference shows the deterioration of system performance caused by decentralized inventory control we try to design a mechanism to coordinate the decentralized system that is to make decentralized system perform as well as system optimal solution though the decisions separated we show that a liner transfer based on the backorder between the component suppliers qualifies this task

optimization of order up to s policies for two level inventory systems with compound poisson demand abstract we consider a two level inventory system with one warehouse and n retailers leadtimes are constant and the retailers face different compound poisson demand processes all facilities apply order up to s replenishment policies we show how to evaluate holding and shortage costs exactly

the role of ethical leadership versus institutional constraints a simulation study of financial misreporting by ceos this article examines the proposition that a major cause of the major financial accounting scandals that received much publicity around the world was unethical leadership in the companies and compares the role of unethical leaders in a variety of scenarios through the use of computer simulation models it shows how a combination of ceo s narcissism financial incentive shareholders expectations and subordinate silence as well as ceo s dishonesty can do much to explain some of the findings highlighted in recent high profile financial accounting scandals furthermore it shows that the nature and impact of ethical leadership depends greatly on the institutional setting and can be expected to vary greatly by country and culture in certain circumstances ethical leadership can have either a negligible or even opposite effect to that expected

the role of inventory in delivery time competition the paper operationalizes the notion of shortage cost by considering the behavior of customers and competing firms and examines the role of inventory in response time competition we start with a single firm production control model in which customers are characterized by their preferences of price quality and delivery time the optimal production inventory policy and the optimal choice between make to order and make to stock operations are determined in simple newsboy like formulas the basic model is then extended to an n firm market game in which firms compete for orders from the aspect of early delivery one could think of this setting as an oligopoly racing market the analysis shows that competition can breed a demand for produce to stock just as other economic phenomena such as economies of scale uncertainty or seasonality can induce make to stock and that delivery time competition increases the buyer s welfare while decreasing the producer s welfare

modified echelon r q policies with guaranteed performance bounds for stochastic serial inventory systems we consider the classic continuous review nstage serial inventory system with a homogeneous poisson demand arrival process at the most downstream stage stage 1 any shipment to each stage regardless of its size incurs a positive fixed setup cost and takes a positive constant lead time the optimal policy for this system under the long run average cost criterion is unknown finding a good worst case performance guarantee remains an open problem we tackle this problem by introducing a class of modified echelon r q policies that do not require qi 1 qi to be a positive integer stage i 1 ships to stage i based on its observation of the echelon inventory position at stage i if it is at or below ri and stage i 1 has positive on hand inventory then a shipment is sent to stage i to raise its echelon inventory position to ri qias close as possible we construct a heuristic policy within this class of policies which has the following features first it has provably primitive dependent performance bounds in a two stage system the performance of the heuristic policy is guaranteed to be within 1 k1 k2 times the optimal cost where k1 is the downstream fixed cost and k2 is the upstream fixed cost we also provide an alternative performance bound which depends on efficiently computable optimal r q solutions to n single stage systems but tends to be tighter second the heuristic is simple it is efficiently computable and it performs well numerically it is even likely to outperform the optimal integer ratio echelon r q policies when k1 is dominated by k2 third the heuristic is asymptotically optimal when we take some dominant relationships between the setup or holding cost primitives at an upstream stage and its immediate downstream stage to the extreme for example when h2 h1 0 where h1 is the downstream holding cost parameter and h2 is the upstream holding cost parameter

has job stability declined yet new evidence for the 1990 s we update the evidence on changes in job stability through the mid 1990s using recently released current population survey data for 1995 that parallel earlier job tenure supplements in the aggregate job stability declined modestly in the first half of the 1990s moreover the relatively small aggregate changes mask rather sharp declines in stability for workers with more than a few years of tenure nonetheless the data available to this point do not support the conclusion that the downward shift in job stability for more tenured workers and the more modest decline in aggregate job stability reflect long term trends

finding all equilibria in games of strategic complements i present a simple and fast algorithm that finds all the pure strategy nash equilibria in games with strategic complementarities this is the first non trivial algorithm for finding all pure strategy nash equilibria

newsvendor competition under asymmetric cost information abstract we study the newsboy duopoly problem under asymmetric cost information we extend the lippman and mccardle 1997 of competitive newsboy to the case where the two firms are privately informed about their unit costs the market demand is initially split between two firms and the excess demand for each firm is reallocated to the rival firm we show the existence and uniqueness of a pure strategy equilibrium and characterize its structure the equilibrium conditions have an interesting recursive structure that enables an easy computation of the equilibrium order quantities presence of strategic interactions creates incentives to increase order quantities for all firm types except the type that has the highest possible unit cost consequently competition leads to higher total inventory in the industry however contrary to intuition this is only true when the firms are non identical a firm s equilibrium order quantity increases with a stochastic increase in the total industry demand or with an increase in his initial allocation of the total industry demand we demonstrate our model and results in an application in a dual sourcing procurement setting using data that obtained from a large manufacturing company finally we provide a full characterization of the equilibrium of the game for the special case of uniform demand and linear market shares

the evolution of job stability in canada trends and comparisons with u s results using data from the 1976 2001 canadian labour force survey we examine the stability of currently held jobs and find no period long drop in job stability however job stability declined across the 1980s and rose across the 1990s for workers with less than one year of tenure when 1987 and 1995 are compared it can be seen that job stability was steady in canada but fell slightly in the united states with the difference concentrated among medium tenured workers we suggest that this difference was due to a slower recovery in canada in the 1990s which caused canadian workers to be less mobile jel classification j63 l evolution de la stabilite des emplois au canada tendances et comparaisons avec les resultats aux etats unis en utilisant les donnees de l enquete sur la population active pour la periode de 1976 a 2001 l auteur examine la stabilite des emplois detenus pour le moment et trouve qu il n y a pas eu de chute de la stabilite des emplois en longue periode cependant la stabilite des emplois a chute dans les annees 1980 et cru dans les annees 1990 pour les travailleurs qui detenaient leur emploi depuis moins d un an si l on compare 1987 et 1995 la stabilite des emplois se maintient au canada mais chute un peu aux etats unis la difference est concentree dans le groupe de travailleurs qui ne detenaient leur emploi que depuis une periode moyennement longue on suggere que les differences entre les deux pays sont attribuables a une reprise economique plus lente au canada dans les annees 1990 qui aurait rendu les travailleurs canadiens moins mobiles

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

the measurement of unemployment an empirical approach although the unemployment rate is one of the most widely cited and closely monitored economic statistics the definition and measurement of unemployment remain controversial an important issue is whether non employed persons who display a marginal attachment to the labor force for example those who are available for and desire work but are not searching for work should be classified as unemployed or non participants although this issue has been extensively debated it has never been tested empirically this paper carries out empirical tests of this and related hypotheses using a unique longitudinal data set from canada we find within the marginally attached a waiting group whose behavior indicates that they would be more appropriately classified as unemployed rather than out of the labor force the remainder of the marginally attached exhibit behavior between that of the unemployed and the balance of non participants suggesting that the desire for work among non searchers conveys substantial information about labor force attachment and future employment status our methods also apply to heterogeneity within the unemployed and we investigate behavioral variation linked to differences in job search methods and reasons for entry into unemployment although those using passive job search do exhibit behavior somewhat distinct from active searchers our results reject the practice of classifying passive job searchers as out of the labor force overall our results indicate that the non employed are very heterogeneous so that any single division into unemployment and out of the labor force is unlikely to fully capture the variety of degrees of labor force attachment this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

supply chain choice on the internet internet companies extensively use the practice of drop shipping where the wholesaler stocks and owns the inventory and ships products directly to customers at retailers request under the drop shipping arrangement the supply chain benefits from risk pooling because the inventory for multiple retailers is stocked at the same location the wholesalers another more traditional channel alternative on the internet is one in which retailers stock and own the inventory these two supply chain structures which predominate on the internet result in different inventory risk allocation stocking decisions and profits for channel members moreover the two channel alternatives can be combined into a dual strategy whereby the retailer uses local inventory as a primary source and relies on drop shipping as a backup we model the dual strategy as a noncooperative game among the retailers and the wholesaler analyze it and obtain insights into the structural properties of the equilibrium solution to facilitate development of recommendations for practicing managers finally we characterize situations in which each of three channels is preferable by specifying appropriate ranges of critical parameters including demand variability the number of retailers in the channel wholesale prices and transportation costs

job stability in the united states two key attributes of a job are its wage and its duration much has been made of changes in the wage distribution in the 1980s but little attention has been given to job durations since hall we fill this void by examining the temporal evolution of job retention rates in u s labor markets using data assembled from the sequence of current population survey job tenure supplements there have been relative declines in job stability for some of the groups that experienced the sharpest declines in relative wages however we find that aggregate job retention rates have remained stable

rationalizability learning and equilibrium in games with strategic complementarities we study a rich class of noncooperative games that includes models of oligopoly competition macroeconomic coordination failures arms races bank runs technology adoption and diffusion r d competition pretrial bargaining coordination in teams and many others for all these games the sets of pure strategy nash equilibria correlated equilibria and rationalizable strategies have identical bounds also for a class of models of dynamic adaptive choice behavior that encompasses both best response dynamics and bayesian learning the players choices lie eventually within the same bounds these bounds are shown to vary monotonically with certain exogenous parameters we study the class of noncooperative supermodular games introduced by topkis 1979 and further analyzed by vives 1985 1989 who also pointed out the importance of these games in industrial economics supermodular games are games in which each player s strategy set is partially ordered the marginal returns to increasing one s strategy rise with increases in the competitors strategies so that the game exhibits strategic complementarity 2 and if a player s strategies are multidimensional marginal returns to any one com ponent of the player s strategy rise with increases in the other components this class turns out to encompass many of the most important economic applications of noncooperative game theory in macroeconomics diamond s 1982 search model and bryant s 1983 1984 rational expectations models can be represented as supermodular games in each of these models more activity by some members of the economy raises the returns to increased levels of activity by others in oligopoly theory some models of bertrand oligopoly with differentiated products qualify as supermodu lar games in these games when a firm s competitors raise their prices the marginal profitability of the firm s own price increase rises a similar structure is present in games of new technology adoption such as those of dybvig and spatt 1983 farrell and saloner 1986 and katz and shapiro 1986 when more users hook into a communication system or more manufacturers adopt an interface standard the marginal return to others of doing the same often rises similarly in some specifications of the bank runs model introduced by diamond and dybvig 1983 when more depositors withdraw their funds from a bank it is more worthwhile for other depositors to do the same in the warrant exercise

exact and approximate evaluation of batch ordering policies for two level inventory systems we consider a two level inventory system with one warehouse and n identical retailers lead times transportation times are constant and the retailers face independent poisson demand in a previous paper we derived a recursive procedure for determining the policy costs for an average item in case of one for one replenishment policies in this paper we show how these results can be used for the exact or approximate evaluation of more general policies where both the retailers and the warehouse order in batches we compare our methods to the method recently suggested by a svoronos and p zipkin

inventory sharing and rationing in decentralized dealer networks an increasing number of manufacturers have started to pursue a strategy that promotes inventory sharing among the dealers in their distribution network in this paper we analyze a decentralized dealer network in which each independent dealer is given the flexibility to share his inventory we model inventory sharing as a multiple demand classes problem in which each dealer faces his own customer demand with high priority and inventory sharing requests from other dealers with low priority assuming that each dealer uses a base stock and threshold rationing policy for his inventory stocking and inventory sharing decisions we explicitly model the interactions between the dealers through inventory sharing and obtain aclosed form cost function for each dealer based on the steady state distribution of the inventory levels at the two dealers we then provide a detailed supermodularity analysis of the inventory sharing and inventory rationing game in which each dealer has a two dimensional strategy set stocking level and rationing level we show that the full sharing game in which dealers precommit to sharing all of their on hand inventory and the fixed sharing level game in which dealers precommit to sharing a portion of their on hand inventory are supermodular and thus a pure strategy nash equilibrium is guaranteed to exist for the rationing game in which dealers precommit to their stocking levels we show that there exists a dominant strategy equilibrium on the dealers sharing rationing levels finally a comprehensive computational study is conducted to highlight the impact of the manufacturer s incentives subsidies and or transshipment fees on the dealers sharing behavior

evaluation of installation stock based r q policies fortwo level inventory systems with poisson demands we consider a two level inventory system with one warehouse and n retailers leadtimes transportation times are constant and the retailers face different poisson demand processes all facilities apply continuous review installation stock r q policies with different reorder points and batch quantities we show how to evaluate holding and shortage costs exactly in case of two retailers in case of more than two retailers we use the same methodology as an approximation when evaluating costs at a certain retailer the other retailers are then aggregated into a single retailer

inventory management with asset based financing most of the traditional models in production and inventory control ignore the financial states of an organization and can lead to infeasible practices in real systems this paper is the first attempt to incorporate asset based financing into production decisions instead of setting a known exogenously determined budgetary constraint as most existing models suggest we model the available cash in each period as a function of assets and liabilities that may be updated periodically according to the dynamics of the production activities furthermore our models allow different interest rates on cash balance and outstanding loans which is an enhancement over most traditional models in that inventory financed by a loan may be more expensive than that by out of pocket cash we demonstrate the importance of joint consideration of production and financing decisions in a start up setting in which the ability to grow the firm is mainly constrained by its limited capital and dependence on bank financing we then explain the motivation for asset based financing by examining the decision making at a bank and a set of retailers in a newsvendor setting