Essays in Supply Chain Management.
详细信息
文摘
This dissertation contains three self-contained chapters. In Chapter 1,we consider a supply chain consisting with a supplier who invests in innovation to increase the value of products to consumers and a manufacturer who sells to consumers. We study three different contracts: a wholesale price contract,a quality-dependent wholesale price contract,and a revenue-sharing contract. We confirm that only the revenue-sharing contract can always coordinate supply chain decisions. However,the manufacturers profit is higher with a quality-dependent wholesale price contract than with a revenue-sharing contract in some cases. We then study upstream competition between suppliers,and show that with the wholesale price contract,by inviting upstream competition,the manufacturer can increase his profit to the level at which he sets the quality-dependent wholesale price in a one-to-one supply chain. Furthermore,under upstream competition,the revenue-sharing contract is optimal for the manufacturer. We take the upstream suppliers perspective in Chapter 2. We analyze the suppliers optimal innovation decisions under the wholesale price contract or bilateral bargaining,with or without downstream competition. We also demonstrate that the supplier is better off using the wholesale price contract than using bilateral bargaining. Interestingly,the manufacturers profits can also be higher with the wholesale price contract in some cases. In the bargaining case,surprisingly,the downstream competition hurts the supplier under certain conditions. Lastly,we show that a horizontal merger between two manufacturers may not always benefit them. Chapter 3 considers warranty pricing for durable goods,taking product failures into account. Consumers are forward looking and solve a dynamic program to make purchase decisions. Due to the large number of products and remaining warranty lengths,the consumers problem and the corresponding estimation problem are high dimensional. We introduce the so-called inclusive value processes to reduce the dimension of the estimation problem. We estimate consumers preferences using the resulting structural model and individual level transaction data from an electronics retail chain. By conducting counterfactual experiments,we find that extended warranties are generally underpriced in our data set； and the optimal price differs by brand. Lastly,we explore the impact of product reliability on the retailers profit.