In a decentralized supply chain, with long-term competition between independent retailers facing random demands and buying from a common supplier, how should wholesale and retail prices be specified, in an attempt to maximize supply-chain wide profits? We show what types of coordination mechanisms allow the decentralized supply chain to generate aggregate expected profits equal to the optimal profits in a centralized system, and how the parameters of these (perfect) coordination schemes can be determined. We assume that the retailers face stochastic demand functions which may depend on all of the firms ’ prices as well as a measure of their service level, e.g., the steady-state availability of the product. We systematically compare the coordination mechanisms when retailers compete only in terms of their prices, In a decentralized supply chain, with long-term competition between independent retailers facing random demands and buying from a common supplier, how should wholesale and retail prices be specified, in an attempt to maximize supply-chain wide profits? The design of effective coordination mechanisms in supply chains has recently received considerable

Strategically deciding between various global expansion alternatives at the various stages of the supply chain of a large multinational firm is a very challenging problem. The firm ′ s supply chain manager decide between Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), outsourcing and other global expansion strategies at the various stages of the supply chain, in order to reduce costs and satisfy the demand for its products or services in different countries (or regions). The choice between the various alternatives could save millions of dollars. We model this problem by considering the alternatives FDI and outsourcing, without loss of generality. The problem is modeled as a Mixed Integer Nonlinear Program (MINLP) with the assumption that the good flow is unidirectional, which means the production and distribution networks admit no reverse flow. The proposed model optimizes the overall supply chain costs by taking into account the production cost, the inventory holding cost, and the fixed cost (or interest on fixed cost), if any, at the various stages and the transportation cost between the stages. The analysis of the proposed model on a 8-stage supply 1 chain, validates some intuition on the FDI-outsourcing strategies that are obtained by including fixed and transport costs to the model. Index terms- Global expansion strategies, global sourcing, foreign direct investment, outsourcing, and MINLP model. 1

This paper presents a scheme for classifying the Supply Chain Management (SCM) literature. SCM is broadly defined to include all classical business functions and theoretic management disciplines which impacted this emerging field. Consequently, its literature is very disjoint and disparate. It transcends several academic disciplines and professions. This paper presents a way to define the field in its entirety and delineate all of its facets in a manner that is parsimonious yet discriminating. Sample articles are classified to illustrate the descriptive power and the parsimony of this taxonomy.