How information influences the cost of transport in a supply chain, a monte carlo simulation

The present paper studies the impact of information sharing and contractual instruments on a shipper and her transport suppliers through a monte carlo simulation. After reviewing the literature, we propose a model to measure the benefits in terms of expected transport cost and variance of this cost. We evaluate three scenarios over a reiterated-single period setting in a shipper carrier single-echelon model with a mix of long-term and short-term procurement strategies: perfect information, asymmetric information and private information at one level of the supply chain. After spelling out the optimal parameters for the procurement policy, we evaluate the rent transfer between carrier and shipper in a numeric example using the monte-carlo method