题目：Management of Supply Risks through Source Diversification and Dynamic Pricing

报告人：香港科技大学 郑少辉 教授

报告时间：2018年6月15日(周五) 上午9:30

地点：管理楼管阶二

报告摘要：It is quite common for firms to have suppliers that are exposed to risk of disruption due to natural disasters, accidents, strikes or other events. When facing such suppliers, it is important for the firm to have appropriate mitigation strategies. Two such possible strategies are source diversification and dynamic pricing: the former helps to hedge again the disruption risk of an individual supplier, while the later could be used to manage the demand flow and realize a higher profit margin with limited stock when suffering a shortage. We study a firm's joint optimization problem of dynamic pricing and inventory replenishment from multiple unreliable suppliers. Specifically, we analyze the following single-item, periodic-review inventory model: demands in consecutive periods are independent random variables with price-sensitive distributions; unsatisfied demand is backlogged; the firm has two unreliable suppliers which may or may not be able to deliver each order, and the delivery lead times are different. We aim at characterizing the optimal ordering and pricing policies in each period over a planning horizon, and analyzing the impacts of supply source diversification and supplier reliability, on the firm's optimal profit and operational policies, on its customers, and on its suppliers. We show that, when both suppliers are unreliable, the optimal inventory policy in each period is a reorder point policy and the optimal price is decreasing in the starting inventory level of the period. In addition, we show that having supply source diversification benefits both the firm and its customers. We also demonstrate that, with the selling price as a decision, a supplier may receive even more order from the firm after an additional supplier is introduced, which seems counter-intuitive and is different from the result in the case when the selling price is exogenously given.

报告人简介：

Shaohui Zheng is a Chair Professor and the Head of the Department of Information Systems, Business Statistics and Operations Management, School of Business and Management at HKUST.

Professor Zheng received his Ph.D. degree in Operations Research from Columbia University. His current research interests include supply chain management, operations of manufacturing and service systems, the interface of operations and marketing, and general applied probability models. His research works appear in Operations Research, Management Science, Production and Operations Management, IIE Transactions, Journal of Applied Probability, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, and Queueing Systems etc. He also has one academic book published by Springer-Verlag.

Professor Zheng is an associate editor for Operations Research. He was also a guest editor for Annals of Operations Research, and an associate editor for Asia-Pacific Journal of Operational Research. Besides, he served as a Judge for various major paper competition, including Wickham Skinner Award of the Productions and Operations Management Society, and the MSOM Student Paper Competition of the MSOM/INFORMS society.