| dc.description.abstract | The practice of suppliers providing incentives to retailers to promote the sales is popular in today’s business. Trade credit, cash discount, quantity discount, cost sharing, etc., are the quite prevalent payment reduction schemes in reality. As a result, the influences of incentive policies cannot be ignored on modeling supply chain system. Also, coordination among channel member is important for enhancing a channel’s competitiveness. This indicates that companies in the same channel shall align their incentives to pull in the same direction. This research develops several models to consider coordinating supply chain decisions under incentive policies for different circumstances. The purpose is to relax several assumptions to cope with more practical situations.
In this dissertation we firstly consider supplier-retailer channels subject to trade credit and quantity discounts for freight cost. Then we extend the model to consider the situation when price freight–transport discounts that are positively related to the weight of cargo transported in a multi-item supply chain. When considering retailer promotion policy, we present a model to analyze and compare two cooperative promotion allowances, promotional effort cost sharing and cash discount, which are designed for coordinating channel partner’s behavior in the third model. Also, we deal with the dynamic pricing, promotion and replenishment policies for a deteriorating item with price and time dependent demand. In addition, the multi-retailers channel of distribution has occurred in many industries, such as electronics, appliances and apparel etc. We develop a dual-channel supply chain that the end demand for each channel has substitute effect in terms of retail prices. We also consider a multi-retailers channel with sales learning curve when the retailer competition arises from substitution effect due to shortages.
For each model, we not only provide propositions for the conditions of optimality but also develop algorithms to search optimal solutions, which can be easily implemented in practice. Through the numerical analyses, we discuss the influences of system parameters on decisions and behaviors of the channel. We conclude with computation analyses that lead to a variety of management insights. These results should be a useful reference for managerial decisions and administrations. | en_US |