Options as a Marketing Tool: Pricing a Promotional Scheme for a Product with a Secondary Market

Adding options to durable products allows new opportunities for manufacturers and retailers in markets with a secondary market to create better segmentation schemes, provide creative means to differentiate their products and services, and increase the value they offer consumers. This raises the need for sellers to properly price such options. This work presents a few examples of incentive programs for the car industry, develops models and calculates their cost to the seller, demonstrating the applicability of the proposed methodology. Our numerical results indicate that such options are surprisingly inexpensive for car manufacturers and dealers. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Direct Marketing in Oligopoly

We consider a game in which symmetric manufacturers decide whether to set up sites (e.g., web sites) where consumers can buy their products directly. Following this decision, the manufacturers choose quantities to sell to the retailers, and then the manufacturers with direct‐sales sites and retailers choose quantities to sell to the consumers. We show that since an increase in the number of retailers may drive the direct‐selling manufacturers from the retail market, it may raise the retailers’ profit and reduce social welfare. Finally, we discuss two cases: an oligopolistic wholesale market and a market with price competition and differentiated products.     

不对称信息的供应链激励机制研究

研究由单个制造商和单个零售商组成二级供应链,基于市场需求是线性的,且受价格与销售努力的影响。首先,研究在对称信息下,集中模式和分散模式两种情况下的供应链,求出制造商和零售商使得利润达到最优时的最优批发价及销售价;其次,研究了在信息不对称情况下,制造商的机制设计问题,得到了制造商激励批发价的表达式以及零售商的最优零售价的公式;最后利用实例仿真对模型进行分析,结果表明该激励机制对整个供应链的收益有改善作用。     

政府规制下快递包装回收策略

考虑快递包装的两种回收模式,通过建立快递企业回收和第三方回收中心回收两种闭环供应链模型,探讨政府规制措施对各主体回收快递包装决策的影响。研究表明:奖惩力度的提升能有效提高快递包装的回收率;包装制造商的收益随着奖惩力度的增加呈先增后减的变化趋势,随着目标回收率的增加呈减少的变化趋势;回收模式对包装制造商收益的影响较小;当政府的奖惩力度较小时,快递企业在两种回收模式下的收益相近,随着奖惩力度的增加,快递企业更倾向于选择自主回收快递包装,以获得更大收益。     

家乐福渠道运行中零售商与供应商的关系管理

在经历了30年（1960—1990）的历练后,连锁超市已成为占主导地位的零售业态。通过坚持不懈地推广连锁经营,零售商不断冲破地域限制形成了规模经济,从而可越过批发商直接从供应商进货,原来的产销矛盾开始演化为供应商一零售商矛盾。在市场大供应链终端的零售业本身渠道运行效率提高的同时,供应商一零售商矛盾的出现对营销带来了新的挑战。本案例选择由法国人M·富安尼先生创立的于1995年进入北京市场的家乐福连锁零售公司（Carrefour,以下简称家乐福）为零售业的代表,深入研究家乐福对供应商的分类、选择、建立业务关系和奖罚等行为。在布局上,首先,简要介绍案例企业背景和家乐福的概况及其货物采购;其次,深入研究家乐福与供应商业务的建立、维护和发展;最后,详细分析家乐福对供应商的管理行为（包括奖罚等）,以便进一步实例论述渠道运作中零售商与供应商的关系管理。     

供应商对不同风险偏好的销售商激励机制研究

利用委托-代理理论,在由单个供应商和单个销售商所组成的简单供应链中,分别研究了供应商和销售商在具有相同风险偏好和不同风险偏好下供应商对销售商的最优激励机制的设计问题,结果表明,在需求不确定且依赖于销售商努力水平的情形下,不同的风险偏好不会影响销售商的努力水平,但在整个激励机制的设计上,会有不同点,并且说明了销售商越是风险规避的,其承担风险的动力就越小。     

Slotting Allowances and Scarce Shelf Space

Slotting allowances are payments made by manufacturers to obtain retail shelf space. They are widespread in the grocery industry and a concern to antitrust authorities. A popular view is that slotting allowances arise because there are more products than retailers can profitably carry given their shelf space. We show that the causality can also go the other way: the scarcity of shelf space may in part be due to the feasibility of slotting allowances. It follows that slotting allowances can be anticompetitive even if they have no effect on retail prices.     

Product Differentiation by Competing Vertical Hierarchies

We revisit the choice of product differentiation in the Hotelling model, by assuming that competing firms are vertically separated, and that retailers choose products' characteristics. The “principle of differentiation” does not hold because retailers with private information about their marginal costs produce less differentiated products in order to increase their information rents. Hence, information asymmetry within vertical hierarchies may increase social welfare by inducing them to sell products that appeal to a larger number of consumers. We show that the socially optimal level of transparency between manufacturers and retailers depends on the weight assigned to consumers' surplus and trades off two effects: higher transparency reduces price distortion but induces retailers to produce excessively similar products.     

Incentive contract design for food retailers to reduce food deserts in the US

In the US, obesity affects over 37% of the adult population and over 16% of the child and adolescent population. Although not-for-profit agencies cannot directly control what a person eats, they can influence the supply side of the obesity epidemic by incentivizing food retailers to open stores in regions of the US where food deserts exist. An incentive contract design dependent upon performance and resulting health benefit is presented for food retailers to reduce food deserts in the US. A principal-agent framework is used to capture the competing interests and moral hazard from the contracting mechanism. Optimization models are developed to determine the most effective and equitable resource allocations from the initiative given a target reduction in obesity rate or a set budget, while determining the optimal subsidy these agencies should offer to food retailers to incentivize operation in certain counties. These subsidies are designed to create financially viable conditions for food retailers to offer high quality, healthy food alternatives. The impact of retailer location on obesity is based on estimates of marginal effect on obesity rate. Given an example initiative in metropolitan Atlanta, Georgia and surrounding counties, the overall county-wide obesity rate would decrease by 1.17% with a fixed budget of $400M. Sensitivity analysis on the reduction in obesity is performed for varying total budget amounts. This incentive contract design strategy is a positive step toward ensuring that the underserved US population has better access to healthy foods while helping solve the obesity epidemic.     

非对称信息下双渠道供应链定价策略研究

针对需求信息非对称的环境下双渠道供应链中零售商和制造商的追求利益最大化的问题,研究了双渠道供应链的定价策略。通过构建数学模型求得了最优解,并且做了相应的数值分析。结果表明:同一渠道需求弹性系数对定价的影响大于交叉渠道需求弹性系数对定价的影响;双渠道供应链各参与者之间需求信息的共享更加有利于制定合理的定价,并取得更高的收益。     

供应链一体化实施策略研究

供应链一体化管理是围绕核心企业,将供应商、制造商、分销商、零售商、直至最终用户连成一个整体的功能网链结构模式。通过对供应链管理的研究,提出了从信息集成、系统协调和组织联结等三个方面实施供应链一体化的策略和方法。     

引入自有品牌的供应链激励机制设计研究

针对引入自有品牌的供应链激励机制设计问题,首先在对称信息和非对称信息下建立由两个制造商和一个零售商组成的供应链激励机制模型,接着分析引入自有品牌的供应链激励机制均衡结果,最后对自有品牌引入前后的均衡结果进行比较。通过分析发现,零售商在制造商品牌上的努力水平始终不超过其在自有品牌上的努力水平;在对称信息下,零售商引入自有品牌肯定会使制造商受到损失,而在非对称信息下制造商可能会从中获利。     

Can incomplete information lead to better social outcomes?

We consider a supply chain where manufacturers can be differentiated along two dimensions—product quality and cost of social responsibility effort. There are two types of manufacturers: high and low. Under complete information, high-type manufacturers exert a greater level of social responsibility effort in comparison with the low-type manufacturers. We then show that under incomplete information, high-type manufacturers have an incentive to exert an even greater level of social responsibility effort. Surprisingly, the extent of effort put in by high-type firms cannot be lower and, in some cases, can be strictly higher under incomplete information.     

基于VMI管理策略的集配中心物流分析

随着全球经济一体化的推进,越来越多的企业将集配中心的管理作为一种新的管理理念,而优化和集成是分销管理的核心。其中,基于VMI管理策略的库存协调是制造商与各零售商进行协同管理的重要组成部分和成功实施的关键因素。VMI管理策略有利于降低大型制造商和零售商的库存成本,缩短交货提前期,实现大型制造与零售商的企业群之间的协同作业,即分散决策和集中决策情形下分别进行了讨论,重点分析了集配中心的营运主体、角色定位和功能范围等。     

“When Should Manufacturers Want Fair Trade?”: New Insights from Asymmetric Information when Supply Chains Compete

We study a model of competing manufacturer/retailer pairs where adverse selection and moral hazard are coupled with promotional externalities at the downstream level. In contrast to earlier models mainly focusing on a bilateral monopoly setting, we show that with competing brands a ‘laissez‐faire’ approach towards vertical price control might not always promote productive efficiency. Giving manufacturers freedom to control retail prices is more likely to harm consumers when retailers impose positive promotional externalities on each other, and the converse is true otherwise. Our simple model also suggests that, with competing supply chains, consumers and manufacturers might prefer different contractual modes if promotional externalities have substantial effects on demands.     

信息共享下绿色供应链价格协调问题研究

在信息共享前提下建立了绿色供应链中制造商、零售商的博弈模型,分别讨论了非合作博弈与合作博弈下的利润模型,制定了该绿色供应链在合作博弈下的内部价格协调机制,以及给出了价格协调参数的两种求解方法。最后,验证了信息共享下该绿色供应链的制造商与零售商进行合作时,不仅能极大的提高消费者对该绿色产品的需求,而且按照对联盟的贡献协调内部价格时,该供应链系统的稳定性与整体效率都得到提高。     

供应链环境下制造商生产能力合作与竞争模型研究

分析由两条两层供应链组成的模型,其中一条供应链中的制造商生产能力有余,而另一条供应链中的制造商生产能力不足的情况,建立了供应链环境下制造商生产能力的合作与竞合模型。通过对模型的分析,发现制造商采取竞争或合作策略的条件是随着市场需求的变化而变动的,最后通过一个算例进行验证。     

Incentives in academics: Collaboration under weak complementarities

This paper considers a contracting relationship with multiple agents in a repeated setting under voluntary team formation. In each period, an opportunity to collaborate arrives stochastically but whether this opportunity has arrived is the agents' private information. The principal thus cannot simply tell them when to collaborate; she must instead guide them through incentives. The optimal contract in the repeated setting can drastically be different from that in the static setting and is often characterized as high-powered team incentives complemented with inefficiently low-powered individual incentives, which endogenously raise the cost of shirking. We then argue that low-powered incentives offered for non-collaborative works, as often observed in our profession, can be seen as an important part of optimal incentive schemes in an attempt to endogenously raise the cost of shirking. The mechanism presented here also has implications for internal team competition (team competition within firms) which has become increasingly popular these days.     

Business Strategies of Incumbents in the Market for Electric Vehicles: Opportunities and Incentives for Sustainable Innovation

This paper focuses on the relation between large car manufacturers’ incentive and opportunity to innovate and their electric vehicle (EV) business strategies. We analyze how environmental regulation and the firm's incentive (measured by net income) and opportunity to innovate (measured by EV asset position, determined from a combination of patent, partnership and prototype data) affected EV sales over the period 1990–2011. During the EV's R&D period in the 1990s, large car manufacturers that were regulated by the full zero emission vehicle mandate developed a significantly stronger EV asset position, but did not sell significantly more EVs than their rivals. During the EV's commercialization period (2007–2011), large car manufacturers with both a strong incentive and a strong opportunity to innovate sold significantly more EVs. Based on these results, the paper offers a typology of business strategies, several managerial implications, and recommendations for policy makers to stimulate sustainable development. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

THE ECONOMIC THEORY OF VERTICAL RESTRAINTS

Abstract.  The types of contracts arising in a typical vertical manufacturer–retailer relationship are more sophisticated than a simple uniform price. In addition to setting per unit prices, manufacturers and retailers also revert to non-linear pricing and non-price instruments. These instruments or contracts are referred to as vertical restraints and can take the form of franchise fees, resale-price maintenance, exclusive dealing, exclusive territories and slotting allowances. The use and the effects of one type of instrument versus another depend crucially on specific market assumptions upstream and downstream and on the division of bargaining power between manufacturers and retailers. This paper surveys the industrial organization literature on retail pricing and shows that vertical restraint instruments have important effects on producer and consumer prices, market structure, efficiency and welfare.