Price fluctuations, information sharing, and supply chain performance

We consider a supply chain consisting of one supplier with finite production capacity and a retailer facing independent and identically distributed demands from end-customers. Existing research advocates that, in a decentralized setting, the retailer and the supplier using stationary order up to policies is efficient. We show that in the presence of information sharing, the supply chain performance can be improved by the supplier offering fluctuating prices. We study two specific settings: (1) the supplier only knows the parameters of the retailer's inventory policy; and (2) the supplier knows the day-to-day inventory levels at the retailer as well. After establishing structure of optimal policies and developing efficient solution procedures, we perform an extensive computational study to determine the extent of the improvements realizable in the supply chain. We observed that for setting 1, an improvement was realized only when the end-customer demands were highly variable. Even then, the improvement in supply chain performance was less than 1%. Whereas, for setting 2, the improvement in supply chain performance averaged around 5.0% with a maximum of 16.3%. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.