Contract efficiency for a decentralized supply chain in the presence of quality improvement

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Abstract

Abstract In this paper, we study a joint pricing and product quality decision problem in a decentralized supply chain consisting of one manufacturer and one retailer. Although the manufacturer decides the product quality with an associated cost, the retailer decides the retail price. We aim to study and compare different contract formats for this decentralized supply chain. There is a trade‐off in the choice of contracts: simpler format contract (with a few parameters) is less complicated, but the contract efficiency is low. We start with the simplest one‐parameter contract: a wholesale price contract that serves as the benchmark. We then study how contract efficiency can be improved by adding one more parameter. Specifically, we consider three two‐parameter contracts that are commonly used in reality: two‐part tariff contract, revenue‐sharing contract, and effort cost sharing contract. We find that the contract efficiency is improved under all the three contracts, but in different ways: the improvement in contract efficiency under each of them dominates the other two when manufacturer's quality improvement effectiveness is relatively low, moderate, and high, respectively. Furthermore, through numerical examples, we find that under some cases, a choice from these three two‐parameter contracts can achieve a close‐to‐perfect efficiency (>85%). Finally, we investigate whether a combination of the three two‐parameter contracts can achieve coordination. Interestingly, we find that only the combination of effort cost sharing contract and revenue‐sharing contract can achieve coordination, whereas combinations of either of them and two‐part tariff contract cannot.

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