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What is the relationship between inventory and sales? Clearly, inventory could increase sales: expanding inventory creates more choice (options, colors, etc.) and might signal a popular/desirable product. Or, inventory might encourage a consumer to continue her search (e.g., on the theory that she can return if nothing better is found), thereby decreasing sales (a scarcity effect). We seek to identify these effects in U.S. automobile sales. Our primary research challenge is the endogenous relationship between inventory and sales—e.g., dealers influence their inventory in anticipation of demand. Hence, our estimation strategy relies on weather shocks at upstream production facilities to create exogenous variation in downstream dealership inventory. We find that the impact of adding a vehicle of a particular model to a dealer’s lot depends on which cars the dealer already has. If the added vehicle expands the available set of submodels (e.g., adding a four-door among a set that is exclusively two-door), then sales increase. But if the added vehicle is of the same submodel as an existing vehicle, then sales actually decrease. Hence, expanding variety across submodels should be the first priority when adding inventory—adding inventory within a submodel is actually detrimental. In fact, given how vehicles were allocated to dealerships in practice, we find that adding inventory actually lowered sales. However, our data indicate that there could be a substantial benefit from the implementation of a “maximize variety, minimize duplication” allocation strategy: sales increase by 4.4% without changing the total number of vehicles at each dealership. This paper was accepted by Vishal Gaur, operations management.

We study the following question: How does competition influence the inventory holdings of General Motors' dealerships operating in isolated U.S. markets? We wish to disentangle two mechanisms by which local competition influences a dealer's inventory: (1) the entry or exit of a competitor can change a retailer's demand (a sales effect); and (2) the entry or exit of a competitor can change the amount of buffer stock a retailer holds, which influences the probability that a consumer finds a desired product in stock (a service-level effect). Theory is clear on the sales effect—an increase in sales leads to an increase in inventory (albeit a less than proportional increase). However, theoretical models of inventory competition are ambiguous on the expected sign of the service-level effect. Via a Web crawler, we obtained data on inventory and sales for more than 200 dealerships over a six-month period. Using cross-sectional variation, we estimated the effect of the number and type of local competitors on inventory holdings. We used several instrumental variables to control for the endogeneity of market entry decisions. Our results suggest that the service-level effect is strong, nonlinear, and positive. Hence, we observe that dealers carry more inventory (controlling for sales) when they face additional competition.

Under a revenue-sharing contract, a retailer pays a supplier a wholesale price for each unit purchased, plus a percentage of the revenue the retailer generates. Such contracts have become more prevalent in the videocassette rental industry relative to the more conventional wholesale price contract. This paper studies revenue-sharing contracts in a general supply chain model with revenues determined by each retailer's purchase quantity and price. Demand can be deterministic or stochastic and revenue is generated either from rentals or outright sales. Our model includes the case of a supplier selling to a classical fixed-price newsvendor or a price-setting newsvendor. We demonstrate that revenue sharing coordinates a supply chain with a single retailer (i.e., the retailer chooses optimal price and quantity) and arbitrarily allocates the supply chain's profit. We compare revenue sharing to a number of other supply chain contracts (e.g., buy-back contracts, price-discount contracts, quantity-flexibility contracts, sales-rebate contracts, franchise contracts, and quantity discounts). We find that revenue sharing is equivalent to buybacks in the newsvendor case and equivalent to price discounts in the price-setting newsvendor case. Revenue sharing also coordinates a supply chain with retailers competing in quantities, e.g., Cournot competitors or competing newsvendors with fixed prices. Despite its numerous merits, we identify several limitations of revenue sharing to (at least partially) explain why it is not prevalent in all industries. In particular, we characterize cases in which revenue sharing provides only a small improvement over the administratively cheaper wholesale price contract. Additionally, revenue sharing does not coordinate a supply chain with demand that depends on costly retail effort. We develop a variation on revenue sharing for this setting.

We study the information sharing in a supply chain of a manufacturer selling to two asymmetric retailers engaged in inventory competition. The dominant retailer has strong bargaining power and market power, which means that it enjoys a lower wholesale price and can obtain part of the unmet demand transferred from the weak retailer. The manufacturer offers a wholesale price to the weak retailer. As the weak retailer’s private demand information is unknown to the other participants, whether to share the information to other players become an important issue. We develop a game-theoretic model to examine four information-sharing formats: no information sharing, only sharing with the dominant retailer, only sharing with the manufacturer, and full information sharing. We obtain the equilibrium profits and decisions under the four sharing formats and investigate the firms’ preferences regarding these formats. We find that the weaker retailer prefers not sharing information and only sharing information with the dominant retailer formats, since these two formats lower the wholesale price and increase the weak retailer’s order quantity. The dominant retailer prefers full information sharing to only sharing with the dominant retailer because the former format increases the manufacturer’s wholesale price to the weaker retailer, thereby improving the dominant retailer’s total demand. This study also provides a theoretical basis for the application of advanced information technology in the supply chain.

This paper extends the theory of supply chain incentive contracts from the static newsvendor framework of the existing literature to the simplest dynamic setting. A manufacturer distributes a product through retailers who compete on both price and fill rates. We show that inventory durability is the key factor in determining the underlying nature of incentive distortions and their contractual resolutions. When the product is highly perishable, retailers are biased toward excessive price competition and inadequate inventories. Vertical price floors or inventory buybacks (subsidies for unsold inventory) can coordinate incentives in both pricing and inventory decisions. When the product is less perishable, the distortion is reversed and vertical price ceilings or inventory penalties can coordinate incentives.

We develop a model of consumer learning and choice behavior in response to uncertain service in the marketplace. Learning could be asymmetric, that is, consumers may associate different weights with positive and negative experiences. Under this consumer model, we characterize the steady-state distribution of demand for retailers given that each retailer holds a constant in-stock service level. We then consider a noncooperative game in steady state between two retailers competing on the basis of their service levels. The demand distributions of retailers in this game are modeled using a multiplicative aggregate market-share model in which the mean demands are obtained from the steady-state results for individual purchases, but the model is simplified in other respects for tractability. Our model yields a unique pure strategy Nash equilibrium. We show that asymmetry in consumer learning has a significant impact on the optimal service levels, market shares, and profits of the retailers. When retailers have different costs, it also determines the extent of competitive advantage enjoyed by the lower-cost retailer.

An increasing number of manufacturers have started to pursue a strategy that promotes inventory sharing among the dealers in their distribution network. In this paper we analyze a decentralized dealer network in which each independent dealer is given the flexibility to share his inventory. We model inventory sharing as a multiple demand classes problem in which each dealer faces his own customer demand with high priority, and inventory-sharing requests from other dealers with low priority. Assuming that each dealer uses a base-stock and threshold-rationing policy for his inventory-stocking and inventory-sharing decisions, we explicitly model the interactions between the dealers through inventory sharing and obtain a closed-form cost function for each dealer based on the steady-state distribution of the inventory levels at the two dealers. We then provide a detailed supermodularity analysis of the inventory-sharing and inventory-rationing game in which each dealer has a two-dimensional strategy set (stocking level and rationing level). We show that the full-sharing game (in which dealers precommit to sharing all of their on-hand inventory) and the fixed-sharing-level game (in which dealers precommit to sharing a portion of their on-hand inventory) are supermodular, and thus a pure-strategy Nash equilibrium is guaranteed to exist. For the rationing game (in which dealers precommit to their stocking levels), we show that there exists a dominant strategy equilibrium on the dealers’ sharing (rationing) levels. Finally, a comprehensive computational study is conducted to highlight the impact of the manufacturer’s incentives, subsidies, and/or transshipment fees on the dealers’ sharing behavior.

Currently, highly complex supply networks are vulnerable to various kinds of disruptions, which may greatly affect the operational efficiency of supply chains. This calls for the development of management approaches to build a resilient supply chain under disruptions. In this work, we are mainly interested in transportation disruptions that affect shipments along a supply chain and study the decision problem of suppliers in regards to acquiring and sharing transportation disruption information in a competitive setting. In particular, we investigate a two-echelon supply chain consisting of one buyer and two competing suppliers where the buyer places an order for a single product with the two suppliers. During the product transportation process, a disruption may occur and damage the shipments in transit. In the face of such a transportation disruption, each supplier can either have its shipment inspected and reveal information to the buyer or continue without taking any action. We study this problem by formulating it as a non-cooperative game and derive equilibrium results for the two suppliers on whether or not to share information considering competition. We find that the timing and severity of the transportation disruption affect a supplier’s decision on whether to acquire and share private information. By adopting an incentive mechanism, the buyer can raise the probability that a supplier shares its information, which could eventually enhance the performance of the disrupted supply chain. The supplier in a stronger market position usually acts passively towards the disruption, while the competing supplier tends to use information sharing as a way to win market share from its competitor. In addition, a sensitivity analysis is conducted on some important parameters of our model to show the impact of information sharing on supply chain performance.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to propose and validate a theoretical model to investigate whether supply chain (SC) innovation positively affects risk management capabilities, such as robustness and resilience in global SC operations, and to examine how these capabilities may improve competitive advantage. Design/methodology/approach A theoretical model was developed from extant studies and assessed through the development of a large-scale questionnaire survey conducted with South Korean manufacturers and logistics intermediaries involved in global SC operations. The data were analysed using confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modelling to validate the suggested model. Findings It was found that innovative SCs have a discernible positive influence on all dimensions of risk management capability, which in turn has a significant impact on enhancing competitive advantage. Therefore, this work provides evidence for the importance of SC innovation and risk management capability in supporting competitive advantage. Research limitations/implications This study contributes to providing an empirical understanding of the strategic retention of SC innovation and risk management capabilities in the SC management discipline. Furthermore, it confirms and expands existing theories about innovation and competitive advantage. Practical implications The finding provides firm grounds for managerial decisions on investment in technology innovation and process innovation. Originality/value This research is the first of its kind to empirically validate the relationships between SC innovation, risk management capabilities and competitive advantage.

PurposeThis research aims to empirically investigate the impacts of product and international diversification strategies on firm-level inventory performance.Design/methodology/approachThis study empirically examines the associations between product and international diversification strategies and inventory performance based on a sample of 64,124 observations across 7,367 US publicly traded firms between 1989 and 2019 from the COMPUSTAT Segment, Fundamental Annual and Fundamental Quarterly data files. We employ both linear and nonlinear regression models to perform our empirical analysis.FindingsThis research provides strong evidence that there exists a U-shaped relationship between unrelated product diversification and inventory level and a partially inverted U-shaped relationship between international diversification and inventory level. We also find a positive impact of related product diversification on inventory level, but there is no significant curvilinear relationship between related product diversification and inventory level.Practical implicationsOur research findings offer important insights into top management’s strategic planning for diversification strategies and operations manager’s inventory control policies to achieve the strategic fit between corporate diversification and inventory management.Originality/valueProduct and international diversification strategies not only play an essential role in the firm’s competitive advantage, but also have a significant influence on operations manager’s inventory decision. This research is among the first to systematically investigate how top management’s related product, unrelated product and international diversification strategies may have complex nonlinear impacts on inventory performance.