University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Operations, Information and Decisions Papers Wharton Faculty Research 11-1999 Competitive and Cooperative Inventory Management in a Two- Echelon Supply Chain With Lost Sales Gerard. P. Cachon University of Pennsylvania Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/oid_papers Part of the Business Administration, Management, and Operations Commons, and the Operations and Supply Chain Management Commons Recommended Citation Cachon, G. P. (1999). Competitive and Cooperative Inventory Management in a Two-Echelon Supply Chain With Lost Sales. Fuqua School of Business, 1-34. Retrieved from https://repository.upenn.edu/ oid_papers/5 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/oid_papers/5 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Competitive and Cooperative Inventory Management in a Two-Echelon Supply Chain With Lost Sales Abstract This paper studies inventory management in a two echelon supply chain with stochastic demand and lost sales. The optimal policy is evaluated and compared with the competitive solution, the outcome of a game between a supplier and a retailer in which each firm attempts ot maximize its own profit. It is shown that supply chain profit in the competitive solution is always less than the optimal profit. However, the magnitude of the competition penalty is sometimes a trifle, sometimes enormous. Several contracts are considered to align the firms’ incentives so that they choose supply chain optimal actions. These contracts contain one or more of the following elements: a retailer holding cost subsidy (which acts like a buy-back/return policy), a lost sales transfer payment (which acts like a revenue sharing contract) and inventory holding cost sharing.