The purpose of this paper is to analyze how strategically the bilaterally monopolistic firms, only-one-seller and only-one-buyer, behave in a situation in which each firm has uncertain information on its opponent firm's cost. Even though the two firms know that seeking integrated profit leads to the optimized profit for both firms, each firm has an incentive to opportunistically behave to increase its share of the integrated profit. These opportunistic behaviors of the firms are analyzed through a game theoretic approach especially finding Nash equilibrium mixed strategies for the strategic profiles such as true-report or not and monitoring or not. The comparative statics to the Nash equilibrium mixed strategies shows that as the profit share increases the probability of monitoring an opponent firm is decreased while the probability increases as the size of the overstated production cost increases. This study also shows that high penalty and low monitoring cost lead to high probability to tell the truth of the production cost.
Information is known to be a key element for the successful operation of a supply chain, which is required of the efficient ordering strategies and accurate predictions of demands. This study proposes a method to effectively utilize the meteorological for
Information is known to be a key element for the successful operation of a supply chain, which is required of the efficient ordering strategies and accurate predictions of demands. This study proposes a method to effectively utilize the meteorological forecast information in order to make decisions about ordering and prediction of demands by using the Taguchi experimental design. It is supposed that each echelon in a supply chain determines the order quantity with the prediction of precipitation in the next day based on probability forecast information. The precipitation event is predicted when the probability of the precipitation exceeds a chosen threshold. Accordingly, the choice of the threshold affect the performances of a supply chain. The Taguchi method is adopted to deduce a set of thresholds for echelons which is least sensitive to changes in environmental conditions, such as variability of demand distributions and production periods. A simulation of the beer distribution game was conducted to show that the set of thresholds found by the Taguchi method can reduce the cumulative chain cost, which consists of inventory and backlog costs.