Mechanism Design for a Sustainable Supply Chain Management

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Supply chain management (SCM) lies at the core of globalization forces that flattened the world over the last decade. That being said, siloed approach to managing supply chain systems that drive economic development and growth has led us down a dangerous path toward unsustainable prosperity. This problem is especially exacerbated due to the increasing degrees of information asymmetry, demand and supply risks and agency costs, all of which prevent the supply chains from reaching to their full potentials. Due to the emergence of complex problems such as climate change, and overexploitation of natural resources, we are on the verge of creating a society ill-suited to the needs and limits of both natural resources and environment. To summarize, current contracts, policies and mechanisms fail to provide a balanced perspective necessary for a sustainable SCM, which can no longer be ruled by a single objective and single mechanism-designer but by multiple objectives and complex interactions among multiple mechanism designers. Hence, in this research program, we intend to develop and analyze a framework that considers a supply chain as a nexus of contracts designed by multiple stakeholders, be they suppliers and retailers who put more emphasis on cost minimization or profit maximization and regulators, government agencies and NGOs which put more emphasis on operational sustainability and ensure the compliance of the internal supply chain members to the environmental considerations. This research proposal is for a 5-year integrative program for modeling and developing multi-lateral mechanisms so as to guide future policy and investments in these systems with the goal of attaining sustainable prosperity. Building upon the applicant's current work in SCM in the presence of asymmetric information combined with recent developments in the theory of incentives with multi-principal and multi-agent systems, the program examines the full path from sustainability to information and risk management in supply chains. The objectives of the research program are, in the short term: - To develop a multi-principal multi-agent framework for a sustainable SCM, where the principals (e.g., regulators, buyers and suppliers, etc.) may have conflicting design objectives for the ultimate supply chain system and where the agents (e.g., upstream and downstream firms) have varying cost, risk and informational characteristics, - To design efficient and optimal mechanisms that are implementable, i.e., that would take into account both profit-maximization (or cost-minimization) incentives of internal supply chain actors and sustainability objectives of external players, and in the long term: - To develop computationally tractable mechanisms by focusing on a combination of structured supply chain contracts (e.g., risk-, revenue- and cost-sharing incentives) and regulatory mechanisms (e.g., audit- and market-based incentives) and analyze their structural properties and performances in terms of efficiency and optimality, - Finally, to evaluate the agency costs for the supply chains plagued with asymmetric information and to explore the role of information-sharing in achieving efficiency and and/or optimality. Supply chain systems are the lifeblood of the economy and those innovations that are transforming them are here to stay in the near future. Success in sustainably harnessing the potential of these systems so as to serve the society most effectively would require a holistic approach that takes into account interdependencies between the various internal as well as external actors. This research will be among the first to develop such an integrated framework to help researchers analyze the contract design problem for a sustainable SCM.