Inventory competition with yield reliability improvement

Chung‐Yee Lee and Tao Lu

Naval Research Logistics (NRL), 2015, vol. 62, issue 2, 107-126

Abstract: This article studies the inventory competition under yield uncertainty. Two firms with random yield compete for substitutable demand: If one firm suffers a stockout, which can be caused by yield failure, its unsatisfied customers may switch to its competitor. We first study the case in which two competing firms decide order quantities based on the exogenous reliability levels. The results from the traditional inventory competition are generalized to the case with yield uncertainty and we find that quantity and reliability can be complementary instruments in the competition. Furthermore, we allow the firms to endogenously improve their yield reliability before competing in quantity. We show that the reliability game is submodular under some assumptions. The results indicate that the competition in quantity can discourage the reliability improvement. With an extensive numerical study, we also demonstrate the robustness of our analytical results in more general settings. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 62: 107–126, 2015

Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/nav.21616

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wly:navres:v:62:y:2015:i:2:p:107-126

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Naval Research Logistics (NRL) from John Wiley & Sons
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().