Portfolio strategies in supply contracts

Traditionally, industrial buyers have focused on long-term contracts for many of their purchasing needs. Recently, however, some high-tech manufacturers have started looking at more flexible contracts for non-strategic components, which enables them to buy from a variety of suppliers and the spot market. We study this type of strategies in a general framework for supply contracts, in which portfolios of contracts can be analyzed and optimized. We examine a multi-period model where expected profit is optimized, and a single-period model where a mean-variance objective is considered. In addition, we investigate what the consequences of such purchasing behavior might be. For this purpose, we study the game where suppliers compete on price and flexibility for the buyer's orders. We characterize the suppliers' Nash equilibria in pure strategies and show that, when demand is log-concave, there exists one or multiple equilibria, and that in any of these, suppliers bid in clusters against other suppliers with similar technologies.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Operations Research Center.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2004

Author dc:creator

• Martínez-de-Albéniz, Victor, 1978-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• David Simchi-Levi.

• Operations Research Center.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/17721

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/17721