A two-stage supply chain with demand sensitive to price, delivery time, and reliability of delivery

We consider a two-stage supply chain with one supplier and one manufacturer. The manufacturer faces a Poisson demand process where the arrival rate depends on the selling price, the announced delivery time, and the delivery reliability defined as the probability of satisfying the announced delivery time. Such a demand model generalizes the works in the literature by simultaneously considering the above three demand sensitivity factors. The main purpose of this paper is to study the equilibrium decisions in the supply chain with an all-unit quantity discount contract. We consider four scenarios regarding whether the leadtime standard, the delivery reliability standard, and the manufacturer’s capacity are endogenous, and whether the manufacturer’s production cost is its private information. We find that an all-unit quantity discount scheme can coordinate the supply chain for most cases. Managerial insights are observed regarding the impact of the three demand sensitivity factors. For example, the breakpoint in an optimal quantity discount contract always increases with the delivery reliability sensitivity under an exogenous delivery reliability, but may decrease under an endogenous delivery reliability; with asymmetric information, a higher variance of the manufacturer’s unit production costs leads to a lower unit wholesale price for the low-cost manufacturer.