Suchergebnisse

AbstractIn this study, we analyze the joint pricing and inventory management during new product introduction when product shortage creates additional demand due to hype. We develop a two‐period model in which a firm launches its product at the beginning of the first period, before it observes sales in the two periods. The product is successful with an exogenous probability, or unsuccessful with the complementary probability. The hype in the second period is observed only when the product is successful. The firm learns the actual status of the product only after observing the first‐period demand. The firm must decide the stocking level and price of the product jointly at the beginning of each of the two periods. In this article, we derive some structural properties of the optimal prices and inventory levels, and show that (i) firms do not always exploit hype, (ii) firms do not always increase the price of a successful product in the second period, (iii) firms may price out an unsuccessful product in the first period if the success probability is above a threshold, and (iv) such a threshold probability is decreasing in the first‐period market potential of the successful product. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 62: 304–320, 2015

ABSTRACTIn this article, we study the scenario under which two information technology (IT) vendor firms compete for the outsourcing requirements of a client firm. The vendors' cost structures are private information. In addition, the vendors can improve their unit costs through learning‐by‐doing and by making investments in process improvement, that is, induced learning. We study the impacts of vendor‐based learning and process improvement in the asymmetric cost setting on the client firm's outsourcing strategy and the vendor firms' process improvement investments. Our analysis reveals that the client firm may adopt the single‐sourcing strategy or a combination of dual and single‐sourcing strategies depending on the learning efficiency of the vendor base. We also find that high heterogeneity in the vendor cost structure increases the first‐period outsourcing requirements of the client firm. Our findings provide interesting managerial implications for the IT outsourcing industry.

AbstractSupply chains are often characterized by the presence of a dominant buyer purchasing from a supplier with limited capacity. We study such a situation where a single supplier sells capacity to an established and more powerful buyer and also to a relatively less powerful buyer. The more powerful buyer enjoys the first right to book her capacity requirements at supplier's end, and then the common supplier fulfills the requirement of the less powerful buyer. We find that when the supplier's capacity is either too low (below the lower threshold) or too high (above the higher threshold), there is no excess procurement as compared to the case when supplier has infinite capacity. When the supplier's capacity is between these two thresholds, the more powerful buyer purchases an excess amount in comparison to the infinite capacity case.