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Customer segmentation, pricing, and lead time decisions: A stochastic-user-equilibrium perspective

Author

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  • Ma, Jun
  • Nault, Barrie R.
  • Tu, Yiliu (Paul)

Abstract

Multiple price/lead time options are often used as a competitive tool in supply chain operations when customers have heterogeneous price and lead time preferences. We study a two-echelon supply chain network consisting of manufacturers and retailers facing customers that differ in their price- and time-sensitivity. We examine how many price/lead time options should be provided by manufacturers and retailers under decentralized and centralized supply chain management with time-cost tradeoffs. We adopt a stochastic-user-equilibrium (SUE) approach in a supply chain network by incorporating discrete choice theory and using a multinomial logit-based variational inequality to express equilibrium conditions. This is one of the first papers to study time-cost tradeoffs in a supply chain network by introducing an SUE approach. One critical part of our analysis is the establishment of concavity of profit functions, which allows for analytical derivation of the equilibrium strategies. Another critical part of our analysis is the development of SUE conditions in decentralized and centralized supply chain networks. We demonstrate that the variance of heterogeneous customers’ time-sensitivity distribution plays a crucial role in customer segmentations in a time-cost tradeoff supply chain. We find that under SUE conditions, there exists a unique equilibrium in the decentralized and centralized supply chain networks, respectively. We conduct comparative statics analyze to demonstrate the effect of SUE and UE conditions and the influence of decentralized versus centralized supply chain management paradigms. We show how the SUE approach can be applied to supply chain network management with time-cost tradeoffs. Our approach can be extended to other tradeoff decision problems in supply chain network management, especially those in which customers are heterogeneous.

Suggested Citation

  • Ma, Jun & Nault, Barrie R. & Tu, Yiliu (Paul), 2023. "Customer segmentation, pricing, and lead time decisions: A stochastic-user-equilibrium perspective," International Journal of Production Economics, Elsevier, vol. 264(C).
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:proeco:v:264:y:2023:i:c:s0925527323002177
    DOI: 10.1016/j.ijpe.2023.108985
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