Asia - Pacific Journal of Operational Research

In this paper, we investigate joint optimal capacity investment, pricing and production decisions for a multinational manufacturer who faces exchange rate uncertainties. We consider a manufacturer who sells its product in both domestic and foreign markets over a multiperiod season. Because of long-lead times, the capacity investment must be committed before the selling season begins. The exchange rate between the two countries fluctuates across periods and the demand in both markets are price...

Information Sharing Across Multiple Buyers in a Supply Chain

We model the impact of information visibility in a two-level supply chain consisting of independent retailers who share upstream supply. The manufacturer supplies similar products to the two retailers and each retailer serves its independent end market. Retailers face one period of demand and satisfy the demand by ordering in the first period or back-ordering some of the demand and satisfying it in the second period. The wholesale price in the second period is decreasing in the total order si...

Inventory Decisions with Decreasing Purchasing Costs

Costs of many items drop systematically throughout their life-cycles, due to advances in technology and competition. Motivated by the management of service parts for some high-tech products, this paper studies inventory decisions for such items. In a periodic review setting with stochastic demand, we model the purchasing costs of successive periods as a stochastic and decreasing sequence. Unit selling price of the item is determined as some mark-up of the purchasing cost and, hence, will chan...

Optimal Procurement Strategy Under Supply Risk

With the rapid expansion of global business, newer suppliers with cheaper but possibly unreliable technologies have entered the marketplace to win orders from buyer firms by beating the price of their perfectly reliable (but expensive) competitors. We model the procurement problem as a Nash game where the buyer has to allocate its purchases between an expensive but reliable supplier, and a cheaper but unreliable supplier. The suppliers specify prices for different proportions of the order awa...