No abstract

In this paper, we consider a buyer who designs a product and owns the brand, yet outsources the production to a supplier. Both the buyer and the supplier incur quality-related costs, e.g., costs of customer goodwill and future market share loss by the buyer and warranty-related costs shared by both the buyer and the supplier whenever a nonconforming item is sold to a customer. Therefore, both parties have an incentive to invest in quality-improvement efforts. This paper explores the roles of different parties in a supply chain in quality improvement. We show that the buyer's involvement can have a significant impact on the profits of both parties and of the supply chain as a whole, and he cannot cede the responsibility of quality improvement to the supplier in many cases. We also investigate how quality-improvement decisions interact with operational decisions such as the buyer's order quantity and the supplier's production lot size.quality cost, supply chain, quality improvement

Un agradecimiento especial a mi director de tesis, el profesor Rubén Darío Guevara, por todas las enseñanzas y el constante apoyo en esta tarea. También a mi familia, quienes nunca me han dejado de apoyar y ser mi soporte. A la Universidad Nacional de Colombia, mi alma mater y el segundo hogar de la familia Espinosa Moreno. Finalmente a los estadísticos Tania López y Juan Camilo Bernal por sus consejos y apoyo, que resultaron muy significativos para el desarrollo de esta tesis.