Essays on supply chain coordination and optimization

The dissertation comprises of three essays that 1) shipping for online sellers to meet the peak demand, 2) incentives and gaming in collaborative projects, and 3) emergency operations optimization under the demand uncertainty. The online retailing is changing the landscape of retail industry as Amazon's market cap has recently doubled that of Wal-Mart in the US. Different from brick and mortar, online sellers rely on 3rd party logistics (3PLs) for the delivery of the goods but the hugely spiked demand during holiday seasons (Cyber Monday, Black Friday, Christmas in the US, or Singles day in China) poses a substantial challenge for the 3PLs to deliver on time. To better manage demand, 3PLs such as UPS, require the sellers to make reservation and to pay a surcharge for extra work. In the first essay, we discuss how these shipping arrangements may affect the online sellers' inventory decisions, and how to coordinate the channel for the sellers and shippers to win-win. In the second essay, we study gaming and incentive issues in collaborative projects. Driven by the needs of technology, finance, and marketing, many projects in diverse industries are moving irreversibly from the “one-firm-does-all” model to outsourcing and collaboration. However, collaborative projects often ran into delays and cost overruns with the Boeing 787 Dreamliner being one of the latest examples. Applying game theoretical models and economics theory of teamwork to project management, we study how the popular risk sharing partnership may change firms’ incentives in project execution and affect project performance in cost and time for various project networks (serial vs. parallel), cost structures (time independent vs. dependent), and information status (symmetry vs. asymmetry). In the third essay, we study the emergency response operations, which are critical to save humans’ lives and properties after a disaster happens. The limited resources and time requirements call for cooperated supply chain operations. We examine a coordinated production and distribution network for rescue kits in disaster reliefs and develop an optimization model to minimize the total tardiness and peak tardiness over the planning horizon. Proposing to deploy supply chain flexibility to cope with the uncertain demand, we show the effectiveness of increasing supply chain flexibility and suggest some managerial insights on configuring such flexibility in emergency operations. In this dissertation, the three essays are structured to form a coherent body as described above on the topic of the coordination and optimization of a supply chain considering different ways to achieve it.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical referencesby Ju Myung Son