W e study the problem of information sharing in a supply chain with two competing manufacturers selling substitutable products through a common retailer. Our analysis shows that the retailer's incentive to share information strongly depends on nonlinear production cost, competition intensity, and whether the retailer can offer a contract to charge a payment for the information. Without information contracting, the retailer has an incentive to share information for free when production economy is large but has no incentive to do so when there is production diseconomy. With information contracting, the retailer has an incentive to share information when either production diseconomy/economy is large or competition is intense. We characterize the conditions under which the retailer shares information with none, one, or both of the manufacturers. We also show that the retailer prefers to sell information sequentially rather than concurrently to the manufacturers, whereas the manufacturers' preferences are reversed.

I n this study, we develop a game-theoretic model to study the encroachment and information sharing decisions in a supply chain with a manufacturer selling through an online retail platform. In the base model, the manufacturer decides whether to encroach or not by selling through an agency channel, in addition to an existing reselling channel, at the same platform, who decides whether or not to share information with the manufacturer. We fully characterize the equilibrium decisions and show how they depend on the commission rate of the agency channel, channel substitutability, and information accuracy. Our analysis unfolds a novel wholesale price effect that extends related results in the literature. We also show that encroachment and information sharing are complementary, and therefore managers should not ignore the impact of one decision on the other decision even when the latter is not a primary motivation of the former. We study several model extensions to obtain additional insights and show that the major findings of the base model are robust and remain mostly valid when some modeling assumptions are changed.

We investigate firms' competitive behaviors in industries where customers are sensitive to both promised delivery time (PDT) and quality of service (QoS) measured by the on-time delivery rate. To study the competition in PDT at the marketing level, we construct an oligopoly game with an external QoS requirement. We show that there exists a unique Nash equilibrium, and the equilibrium QoS exhibits a switching surface structure with respect to capacities. To study the competition in capacity at the strategic level, we construct a two-stage game in which the firms compete in terms of their capacities in stage 1 and in terms of PDT in stage 2. We show the existence of two different types of pure strategy equilibria and characterize them. This study provides the following insights: an index of time-based competitive advantage (ITCA) and the first-mover advantage determine the positions of the firms in time-based competition; either the well-known prisoner's dilemma or off-equilibrium behaviors due to different preferences for equilibria (when multiple equilibria exist) may lead the firms to overinvest in capacity, but no one may gain a competitive advantage; a uniform improvement in internal efficiency (i.e., a uniform capacity cost reduction) may harm everyone; quality differentiation (i.e., going beyond the QoS benchmark) plays a dual role in time-based competition, either helping a firm with a larger ITCA to compete more effectively, or helping a firm possibly with a smaller ITCA to preempt competitors and protect its market advantage. This paper was accepted by Paul H. Zipkin, operations and supply chain management.time-based competition, consumer choice model, Nash equilibrium, switching surface, quality differentiation, capacity competition, marketing-operations interface

When two firms compete for service-sensitive demands based on their product availability, their actions will affect the future market share reallocation. This problem was first studied by Hall and Porteus (2000) using a dynamic game model. We extend their work by incorporating a general demand model, which enables us to obtain properties that reveal the dynamics of the game and the behavior of the players. In particular, we provide conditions under which the market share of a firm has a positive value and give it an upper bound. We further extend the game competition model to an infinite-horizon setting. We prove that there exists a stationary equilibrium policy and that the dynamic equilibrium policy always converges to a stationary equilibrium policy. We demonstrate that demand patterns will dictate how firms compete rationally and show the likely outcomes of the competition.service-sensitive demand, availability competition, demand model, dynamic game, feedback Nash equilibrium, stationary policy, order quantity structure

In this paper, we study the tail behavior of the stationary queue length of an M/G/1 retrial queue. We show that the subexponential tail of the stationary queue length of an M/G/1 retrial queue is determined by that of the corresponding M/G/1 queue, and hence the stationary queue length in an M/G/1 retrial queue is subexponential if the stationary queue length in the corresponding M/G/1 queue is subexponential. Our results for subexponential tails also apply to regularly varying tails, and we provide the regularly varying tail asymptotics for the stationary queue length of the M/G/1 retrial queue

W e consider manufacturer rebate competition in a supply chain with two competing manufacturers selling to a common retailer. We fully characterize the manufacturers' equilibrium rebate decisions and show how they depend on parameters such as the fixed cost of a rebate program, market size, the redemption rate of rebate, the proportion of rebate-sensitive consumers in the market and competition intensity. Interestingly, more intense competition induces a manufacturer to lower rebate value or stop offering rebate entirely. Without rebate, it is known that more intense competition hurts the manufacturers and benefits the retailer. With rebate, however, more intense competition could benefit the manufacturers and hurt the retailer. We find similar counterintuitive results when there is a change in some other parameters. We also consider the case when the retailer subsidizes the manufacturers sequentially to offer rebate programs. We fully characterize the retailer's optimal subsidy strategy, and show that subsidy always benefits the retailer but may benefit or hurt the manufacturers. When the retailer wants to induce both manufacturers to offer rebate, he always prefers to subsidize the manufacturer with a higher fixed cost first. Sometimes the other manufacturer will then voluntarily offer rebate even without subsidy.

We develop a game-theoretic model to study the incentive for competing manufacturers to share supplier audit information. Based on the audit information, each manufacturer decides whether to source from a common supplier who has uncertain responsibility violation risk or to switch to a backup supplier who has no responsibility violation risk but charges a higher price. When supplier responsibility violation occurs, some consumers boycott the manufacturers involved. Audit information allows a manufacturer to reduce the uncertainty about the risk of the common supplier. We show that audit information sharing may make the manufacturers’ sourcing strategies more or less differentiated. As a result, the information-sharing decision is not monotone in the model parameters. We fully characterize the manufacturers’ equilibrium audit information-sharing and sourcing decisions and establish conditions under which audit information sharing induces the manufacturers to adopt more or less responsible sourcing strategies. We also show that a manufacturer could be better off when the cost premium of sourcing from the backup supplier or the risk of the common supplier becomes higher or the audit information becomes less accurate. We consider several extensions of the base model and demonstrate that the main insights remain mostly valid. This paper was accepted by Charles Corbett, operations management.

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