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Nowadays, governments all around the world have implemented rules and launched legislation to enhance environmental sustainability. Supply chain systems are hence operated under different forms of legislation, such as the carbon tax or extended producer responsibility tax. In this paper, we examine the newsvendor model-based supply chain systems with the consideration of all common forms of environmental taxes. We highlight how the retailer’s risk attitude and the number of consumer returns affect: 1) supply chain operations; 2) performances of the environmental taxes; and 3) supply chain coordination (i.e., optimization). To be specific, we derive the optimal inventory decisions of the retailer when she is risk neutral and risk averse, respectively. We then uncover how environmental taxes and consumer returns affect the retailer’s optimal inventory decisions under different risk attitudes. We further explore the supply chain coordination challenge under three different contracts, characterize their flexibility in coordinating the channel and discuss the impacts of the environmental taxes and consumer returns on each coordination mechanism. Our analytical results show that the two-part tariff contract can achieve coordination for the case with a risk neutral retailer only, while markdown sponsor (MDS) contract and revenue-sharing policy (RSP) can achieve coordination for both risk neutral or risk averse retailer cases. Besides, we reveal that the examined contracts can coordinate the supply chain with a risk neutral retailer more flexibly than that with a risk averse retailer. Finally, by comparing between the MDS contract and RSP, we find that the environmental taxes and the consumer returns will affect the coordination mechanism differently toward the risk neutral and risk averse retailers. Impacts brought by the consumer returns are also explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, we have witnessed the wide implementation of many sophisticated supply contracts in the industry, such as the price, rebate, and return (P2R) contract. The P2R contract is offered by the manufacturer to the retailer. In this paper, a practice-based approach is adopted in which we first report the use of P2R contracts in the real world from industrial interviews. Based on the meanings of risk as revealed from the interviews, we proceed to construct analytical models and derive the minimum risk coordinating P2R (PMR*) contract, which yields the minimum level of risk for the manufacturer and coordinates the supply chain. We analytically show that the manufacturer's expected profit is increasing with the return price and the rebate value under the PMR* contract. We reveal that different risk measurements may lead to different PMR* contracts. In particular, when the price-dependent demand distribution takes the additive form, we interestingly find that the manufacturer can become riskfree in coordinating the supply chain with the PMR* contract; however, it is not the case for the multiplicative case. Furthermore, we observe that the demand distribution's shape affects the setting of the PMR* contract. Managerial implications are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sustainability is a prevalent topic as the consumers and the governments are much more concerned about the environmental pollution. To reduce the carbon emission, in real world practice, governments have executed different forms of policies to motivate the firms to operate in a sustainable manner. This paper aims to examine the value of bargaining contract when the supply chain member invests in the sustainability projects, and explore the effectiveness of the direct (e.g., cash grant) and indirect (e.g., an increased environmental tax rate) subsidies in reducing the total carbon emission. We first derive the optimal pricing and sustainability effort under the wholesale pricing contract when either the manufacturer or the retailer makes the sustainability investment. We then consider the supply chain coordination under the two-part tariff, revenue sharing, and bargaining contracts. We uncover that only the bargaining contract can coordinate the supply chain and a Pareto improvement is achieved when the bargaining power of the manufacturer is in a specific range. Finally, we reveal that both the direct and indirect subsidies can increase the sustainability effort but they are not always an effective tool to reduce the total carbon emissions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Radio frequency identification (RFID) is an important tool for enhancing the performance of inventory management. Motivated by our real-world observations in local hospitals, we study the case where a hospital, which is using a bar-coding system, considers switching to an RFID system because the RFID technology can potentially enhance the hospital’s inventory management under the quick response system (QRS). In order to examine the value of RFID, we develop a formal analytical Bayesian model for the information updating process. We derive the expected value of information of the RFID system, and reveal the conditions in which the RFID system outperforms the bar-coding system. In addition, we evaluate the impacts of the QRS toward the expected profit and level of risk of the hospital, the supplier, and the whole supply chain (SC) system. We further propose two policies to help achieve SC coordination. Numerical analyses are reported and important insights are generated. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]