Improving supply chain efficiency through wholesale price renegotiation

Victor Martinez de Albeniz () and David Simchi-Levi
Additional contact information
Victor Martinez de Albeniz: IESE Business School, Postal: Research Division, Av Pearson 21, 08034 Barcelona, SPAIN
David Simchi-Levi: MIT

No D/721, IESE Research Papers from IESE Business School

Abstract: In a decentralized supply chain, double marginalization is an important source of inefficiency. We suggest in this paper a simple mechanism to reduce it that uses a wholesale price contract and renegotiation. Our mechanism only requires repeated interaction, and rational behavior from the players. Specifically, over T rounds of negotiation, the supplier proposes different prices in each round, and the buyer places orders at the quoted price. Even though prices are decreasing in time, the buyer places a positive order, to force the supplier to reduce its price in the following round. This interaction results in higher profits for both supplier and buyer. We solve the buyer and supplier problems and show that, as T increases, supply chain efficiency tends to 100%, and the sub-optimality gap decreases with 1/T. Finally, we discuss how these results can be applied to design negotiation processes.

Keywords: strategic customer; dynamic pricing; supply chain (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 27 pages
Date: 2007-11-21
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ebg:iesewp:d-0721

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