Comparison of (s, S) and (R, T) Policies in a Serial Supply Chain with Information Sharing

Abstract

It has been studied that retailer's using a suboptimal (R, T) policy is often more desirable to make the best use of information flows than the locally optimal (s, S) policy in a two-stage serial supply chain. In this paper, by performing an extensive computational study, we tabulate the benefit of the retailer's using (R, T) policy instead of (s, S) policy in a supply chain with information sharing, and compare it to a maximum possible benefit that could be achieved in a centralized supply chain. We can understand the mechanisms of how the cost parameters and demand variance affect the benefit of the retailer's using (R, T) policy instead of (s, S) policy, by comparing decentralized and centralized systems.