MIT-Zaragoza Speaker Series: Victor DeMiguel

Prof. Victor DeMiguel
LondonBusinessSchool

"Efficiency and Coordination in a Supply Chain with Competing Manufacturers and Retailers"

We study competition in a supply chain where multiple manufacturers compete to supply a set of products to multiple risk-averse retailers who compete to satisfy the uncertain consumer demand. For the symmetric supply chain, we give closed-form expressions for the unique equilibrium, and find that the supply chain efficiency (the ratio of the aggregate utility in the decentralized and centralized chains) depends on the number of manufacturers and retailers and on the degree of retailer differentiation, but is independent of the degree of product differentiation and the retailer risk version. For the asymmetric supply chain, we show how numerical optimization can be used to compute the equilibria, and find that the supply chain efficiency may drop sharply with the asymmetry of either manufacturers or retailers. Finally, we show how revenue-sharing contracts can be used to coordinate the decentralized symmetric chain and recover the same aggregate utility as in the centralized chain.

Bio

Victor DeMiguel is Associate Professor of Management Science and Operations at LondonBusinessSchool. He holds a PhD in Management Science and Engineering from StanfordUniversity. His research focuses on the design, analysis, and application of optimization models and methods for managerial decision making. Applications include portfolio selection, equilibrium modelling and computation, and decomposition methods for large-scale and stochastic optimization.