Supply chain networks, electronic commerce, and supply side and demand side risk

In this paper, we develop a supply chain network model in which both physical and electronic transactions are allowed and in which supply side risk as well as demand side risk are included in the formulation. The model consists of three tiers of decision-makers: the manufacturers, the distributors, and the retailers, with the demands associated with the retail outlets being random. We model the optimizing behavior of the various decision-makers, with the manufacturers and the distributors being multicriteria decision-makers and concerned with both profit maximization and risk minimization. We derive the equilibrium conditions and establish the finite-dimensional variational inequality formulation. We provide qualitative properties of the equilibrium pattern in terms of existence and uniqueness results and also establish conditions under which the proposed computational procedure is guaranteed to converge. We illustrate the supply chain network model through several numerical examples for which the equilibrium prices and product shipments are computed. This is the first multitiered supply chain network equilibrium model with electronic commerce and with supply side and demand side risk for which modeling, qualitative analysis, and computational results have been obtained. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.