Coordination of replenishment policies: game theory and uncertainty in supply chains
Abstract
This chapter proposes a methodology based on game theory to explore the conditions under which different ordering strategies can be used in a supply chain. These conditions include the volatility of market demand and attitudes towards service levels (measured here as back-orders) and risks concerning total costs supported by the firms. The analysis is based on concepts from both industrial engineering and economics. In fact, the authors think that concepts from economics may greatly improve the understanding of supply chains by proposing new points of view. In particular, industrial engineering has mainly modeled inventory management as an optimization problem solved by isolated decision makers, while economics provides concepts such as Nash equilibrium, Pareto optimality and models of attitudes towards risk, in order to study the relationships between each individual decision and the overall performance of a supply chain.