Outsourcing through Three-dimensional Competition

Author

industrial engineering, Yazd University

Abstract

In this paper, we study an outsourced supply chain consisting of one buyer and two suppliers in which the buyer outsources manufacturing of a physical product to two competing suppliers. The suppliers compete for the buyers' demands share, and the buyer allocates the demands to the competing suppliers based on three-dimensional allocation functions. We consider two certain types of allocation function which depend on price, service level and product quality level. They include the exponential allocation function and the Cobb-Douglas allocation function. A three-stage game-theoretic framework is presented to derive the equilibrium values. Since the problem lacks a closed-form solution, numerical studies are conducted over a wide range of some key parameters.

Keywords