Revenue-sharing contract to coordinate independent participants within the supply chain

To improve the performance of the supply chain with one supplier and multiple retailers under deterministic price-sensitive customer demand, an optimal strategy is proposed based on knowledge discovery. First the decentralized system in which the supplier and the retailers are independent, profit-maximizing participants with the supplier acting as a Stackelberg game leader is studied. Numerical examples illustrate the importance of the coordination. The conventional quantity discount mechanism needs to be modified to coordinate the supply chain, so a revenue-sharing contract is proposed to coordinate such supply chain. Lastly, a special decision under certain demand rates is studied. The pricing and replenishment policies can be decided sequentially, which yields much less loss comparing with optimal decision when the demand rates are sufficiently large.

两阶段供需链企业间的博弈分析

供需链是由物流、信息流和资金流联接起来的多个实体构成的供需网络。由于链上的各个实体具有独立的决策权,所以由此引发的信息结构的非对称和决策激励的不一致问题,是导致该分布式系统低效的最主要的原因。本文以一个两阶段的供需链系统为背景,分别论述了在供应商和零售商起主导作用下的两类Stackelberg博弈,给出了博弈的Nash均衡解,并分析了这两种情况下供应商的批发价和零售商的订货量与零售价的变化,然后结合集中式控制系统,分析了分布式系统低效的原因,最后给出了实例,并验证了结果。