Skip navigation
Title: 

Inventory Policies and Information Sharing: An Efficient Frontier Approach

Authors: Caldentey, Rene
Giloni, Avi
Hurvich, Clifford
Keywords: inventory control; supply chain management; information sharing; order smoothing
Issue Date: 1-Mar-2019
Publisher: Stern School of Business, New York University
Abstract: We consider a two-tier inventory management system with one retailer and one supplier. The retailer serves a demand driven by a stationary moving average process (of possibly infinite order) and places periodic inventory replenishment orders to the supplier. In this setting, we study the value of information sharing and its impact on the retailer’s optimal ordering strategy. We argue that information sharing affects performance through two key cost drivers: (i) on-hand inventory variability and (ii) replenishment order variability. We characterize a “Pareto frontier” between these two sources of variability by identifying optimal inventory replenishment strategies that trade-off one type of variability for the other in a cost efficient way. For the case in which the retailer is able to share her complete demand history, we provide a full characterization of the efficient frontier, as well as of an optimal replenishment policy. On the other hand, when the retailer is not able (or willing) to share any demand information we provide a partial characterization of an optimal solution and show that information sharing does not always add value. We also show that the question of identifying conditions under which information sharing does offer value reduces to a delicate analysis of the invertibility (in a time series sense) of a specific stationary process.
URI: http://hdl.handle.net/2451/43902
Appears in Collections:IOMS: Operations Management Working Papers

Files in This Item:
File Description SizeFormat 
CGH_v1.pdfInventory Policies and Information Sharing: An Efficient Frontier Approach1.47 MBAdobe PDFView/Open


Items in FDA are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.