Multi-period Competition in a Supply Chain Network under Demand

Uncertainties and Impact of Supply Side Disruptions

 

Reetabrata Mookherjee, Terry L. Friesz, and Matthew A. Rigdon

Department of Industrial & Manufacturing Engineering

The Pennsylvania State University

University Park, PA 16802

E-mail: {reeto,tfriesz,marigdon}@psu.edu

 

We present a finite horizon stochastic dynamic game involving competing manufacturers and their suppliers. We describe impacts of supply side disruptions on the equilibrium of the game and discuss some effective risk mitigating strategies.  The dynamic supply chain game we consider involves a small number of make-to-order manufacturers who form an oligopoly and produce a family of products using a common product platform. They set the prices of their final differentiated products, accept backorders and face price elastic random demands for their finished goods. Furthermore, these firms procure their input factors (components) in a just-in-time fashion from a small number of suppliers. The capability of any given supplier to provide any given input factor has a finite upper bound. Consequently, explicit production lead times are intrinsic to the strategies of the manufacturers.  Moreover, the competing manufacturing firms face a finite planning horizon arising from relatively short selling periods (for style goods) and also from fast product obsolescence (for electronics component manufacturers). Therefore, each of the competing manufacturers we model needs to make combined sourcing, production and pricing decisions at the beginning of the planning horizon that they follow until the end of the planning horizon. The resulting non-cooperative dynamic game is a generalized Nash game whose equilibrium may be conveniently articulated as a restricted finite dimensional variational inequality. We establish existence of at least one pure strategy Nash equilibrium and outline some of the qualitative properties of that equilibrium. We also outline an efficient algorithm to compute an equilibrium of the game…

 

Back to Presenters’ Page