The impact of supply chain integration on performance: A contingency and configuration approach

Supply chain collaboration: making sense of the strategy continuum

In this paper, we examine the relationship between buyer-supplier partnership quality, and supply chain performance, in the presence of supply and demand side risks and environmental uncertainty. Based on the theoretical underpinnings of resource-based view, relational capital theory, and transaction cost economics, we propose a positive relationship between partnership quality and supply chain performance, which is strengthened in the presence of high demand and supply-side risks, but weakened in the presence of high environmental uncertainty. Empirical evidence, based on the survey data of 127 U.S. firms supports a majority of our arguments. We discuss theoretical and practical ramifications of these findings and offer future avenues of research.

Buyer-Supplier Partnership Quality and Supply Chain Performance: Moderating Role of Risks, and Environmental Uncertainty

This paper surveys the research area of cooperative games associated with several types of operations research problems in which various decision makers (players) are involved. Cooperating players not only face a joint optimisation problem in trying, e.g., to minimise total joint costs, but also face an additional allocation problem in how to distribute these joint costs back to the individual players. This interplay between optimisation and allocation is the main subject of the area of operations research games. It is surveyed on the basis of a distinction between the nature of the underlying optimisation problem: connection, routing, scheduling, production and inventory.

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Operations Research Games: a Survey

Overview of coordination contracts within forward and reverse supply chains

Cooperative game theory and inventory management

In the past, research in operations management focused on single-firm analysis. Its goal was to provide managers in practice with suitable tools to improve the performance of their firm by calculating optimal inventory quantities, among others. Nowadays, business decisions are dominated by the globalization of markets and increased competition among firms. Further, more and more products reach the customer through supply chains that are composed of independent firms. Following these trends, research in operations management has shifted its focus from single-firm analysis to multi-firm analysis, in particular to improving the efficiency and performance of supply chains under decentralized control. The main characteristics of such chains are that the firms in the chain are independent actors who try to optimize their individual objectives, and that the decisions taken by a firm do also affect the performance of the other parties in the supply chain. These interactions among firms’ decisions ask for alignment and coordination of actions. Therefore, game theory, the study of situations of cooperation or conflict among heterogenous actors, is very well suited to deal with these interactions. This has been recognized by researchers in the field, since there are an ever increasing number of papers that applies tools, methods and models from game theory to supply chain problems.

Supply chain collaboration

Production-inventory games: A new class of totally balanced combinatorial optimization games

Inventory cost games are introduced in Meca et al. (1999). These games arise when considering the possibility of joint ordering in n-person EOQ inventory situations. Moreover, the SOC-rule is introduced and analysed as a cost allocation rule for this type of situations. In the current paper it is seen that n-person EPQ situations with shortages lead to exactly the same class of cost games. Furthermore, an alternative characterization of the SOC-rule is offered, primarily based on a transfer property which constitutes a special form of additivity. Necessary input variables for the SOC-rule are the (optimal) individual average number of orders per time unit in case there is no cooperation. Assuming that these average numbers are observable but not verifiable, we allow the players to select them strategically, while knowing that the SOC-rule will be (consecutively) applied as the cost allocation principle. Necessary and sufficient conditions are provided for the existence (and uniqueness) of a so-called constructive equilibrium in which all players make joint orders.

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Cooperation and competition in inventory games

We study the coordination of actions and the allocation of profit in supply chains under decentralized control in which a single supplier supplies several retailers with goods for replenishment of stocks. The goal of the supplier and the retailers is to maximize their individual profits. Since the outcome under decentralized control is inefficient, cooperation among firms by means of coordination of actions may improve the individual profits. Cooperation is studied by means of cooperative game theory. Among others we show that the corresponding games are balanced and we propose a stable solution concept for these games.

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Ana Meca

Papers

Cooperative game theory and inventory management

Supply chain collaboration

Production-inventory games: A new class of totally balanced combinatorial optimization games

Cooperation and competition in inventory games

Cooperation and profit allocation in distribution chains