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This paper considers a supply chain that consists of a manufacturer and a retailer, who concern their respective profits as well as consumer welfare. Each firm's objective is modelled as a weighted sum of its profit and consumer surplus, with the weight on consumer surplus representing the concern level of the firm. We first examine a push supply chain where the manufacturer determines the wholesale price and the retailer determines the order quantity. We derive the optimal decisions and investigate the impact of the firms' consumer surplus consideration on the interactive decisions of the supply chain members and the overall performance of the supply chain. We show that a higher level of retailer's consumer concern does not necessarily lead to higher consumer surplus because her concern on consumers may be exploited by the manufacturer to improve his objective; and the manufacturer's concern on consumers may not benefit the retailer in terms of her profit, especially when the manufacturer's concern level is relatively low. Nevertheless, compared to the for‐profit supply chain, concern on consumer surplus could be beneficial to both firms' profits as well as consumer surplus, inducing a "win‐win‐win" situation under certain conditions. Furthermore, as a social planner, the government seeks to optimize social welfare by adopting subsidy policies, and we examine two types of intervention policies, that is, subsidizing firms and subsidizing consumers. We show that when subsidizing firms, government's quantity‐based subsidy is always more cost‐effective than sales‐based subsidy. As the firms' concern levels become higher or the demand uncertainty becomes lower, subsidizing consumers can achieve higher social welfare than subsidizing firms. Moreover, we examine the impact of the government's budget constraint and concern level on consumer surplus, and extend the analysis to a pull supply chain to show the robustness of the major findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With rapid development of live-streaming e-commerce, an increasing number of firms are collaborating with live-streamers (e.g., online influencers and celebrities) to host online live-shows for selling their products. To reduce the firm's risk and motivate it to stock more, live-streamers can commit a minimum sales volume and/or the effort devoted to attracting fans and promoting the upcoming live-show. In this article, we study the roles of such sales and effort commitments on the performance of a "supply chain" in which a seller sells its product via a live-streamer. Product demand at the live-show is random while depending on the live-streamer's pre-show effort and the seller needs to decide the amount of inventory for sale at the live-show. We consider three scenarios, in which the live-streamer makes sales-only, effort-only, and hybrid commitments, and compare the decisions and profits of both parties. We show that the commitment on sales volume or effort is mutually beneficial to the seller and the live-streamer. Moreover, the hybrid commitment can motivate the seller to stock more inventory and induce more effort from the live-streamer compared to sales-only or effort-only commitment. The live-streamer always prefers the hybrid commitment whereas the seller may prefer the sales-only commitment, for example, when the penalty is at a medium level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Being a scarce resource, airport advertising spaces/billboards have a fixed capacity and the demand largely depends on the firm's marketing efforts. Besides selling the limited capacity directly to its clients, it is common for an airport advertising firm to sell a portion of the capacity, at a discount price, through advertising agencies. By splitting the capacity into two channels, the airport advertising firm encounters a capacity de-pooling effect and it forms into a competition and collaboration relationship with the agencies. In this paper, we investigate the problem of how to fight against the de-pooling effect from a supply chain perspective. Specifically, we study the interactive decisions between an airport advertising firm and an agency firm. The airport advertising firm determines the maximal capacity to sell to the agency firm, and then the two firms compete on marketing efforts with the objective of maximizing their respective profits. We characterize the effect of capacity de-pooling and devise a coordination contract to fight against such effect. Numerical experiments are conducted to evaluate the potential benefit of the contract. • Studying a stylized game-theoretical model for airport advertising space de-pooling. • Devising a contract with subsidy and reward to fight against the capacity de-pooling. • Deriving the optimal split and marketing effort decisions under different strategies. • Capacity de-pooling may induce firms to improve or lower marketing effort levels. • The devised contract can induce a win–win–win situation for the whole supply chain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT This article considers a class of fresh-product supply chains in which products need to be transported by the upstream producer from a production base to a distant retail market. Due to high perishablility a portion of the products being shipped may decay during transportation, and therefore, become unsaleable. We consider a supply chain consisting of a single producer and a single distributor, and investigate two commonly adopted business models: (i) In the 'pull' model, the distributor places an order, then the producer determines the shipping quantity, taking into account potential product decay during transportation, and transports the products to the destination market of the distributor; (ii) In the 'push' model, the producer ships a batch of products to a distant wholesale market, and then the distributor purchases and resells to end customers. By considering a price-sensitive end-customer demand, we investigate the optimal decisions for supply chain members, including order quantity, shipping quantity, and retail price. Our research shows that both the producer and distributor (and thus the supply chain) will perform better if the pull model is adopted. To improve the supply chain performance, we propose a fixed inventory-plus factor (FIPF) strategy, in which the producer announces a pre-determined inventory-plus factor and the distributor compensates the producer for any surplus inventory that would otherwise be wasted. We show that this strategy is a Pareto improvement over the pull and push models for both parties. Finally, numerical experiments are conducted, which reveal some interesting managerial insights on the comparison between different business models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider a supply chain in which a distributor procures from a producer a quantity of a fresh product, which has to undergo a long-distance transportation to reach the target market. During the transportation process, the distributor has to make an appropriate effort to preserve the freshness of the product, and his success in this respect impacts on both the quality and quantity of the product delivered to the market. The distributor has to determine his order quantity, level of freshness-keeping effort, and selling price, by taking into account the wholesale price of the producer, the cost of the freshness-keeping effort, the likely spoilage of the product during transportation, and the possible demand for the product in the market. The producer, on the other hand, has to determine the wholesale price based on its effect on the order quantity of the distributor. We develop a model to study this problem, and characterize each party's optimal decisions in both decentralized and centralized systems. We further develop an incentive scheme to facilitate coordination between the two parties. Computational results are reported to show the effects of freshness-keeping efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]