Risk hedging via option contracts in a random yield supply chain

This article investigates the role of option contracts in a random yield supply chain in the presence of a spot market. Considering a single-period supplier-manufacturer system where the supplier with random yield produces key components for the manufacturer and the manufacturer assembles/processes the components into end products to meet a deterministic market demand, we develop game models to derive the manufacturer’s optimal ordering policy and the supplier’s optimal production policy under two contract mechanisms (with and without option contracts). Our results suggest that option contracts can coordinate the manufacturer’s order quantity as well as the supplier’s production quantity, and eventually achieve optimal supply chain performance, i.e. the random yield supply chain can be completely coordinated with option contracts in our setting. However, our study also reveals that the supplier and the manufacturer are not always better off with option contracts than without. Therefore, the conditions on which Pareto-improvement is achieved are provided in this paper. Finally, by adopting numerical examples, we draw additional managerial insights into managing random yield supply chains in the presence of spot market.