Supply chain coordination with downstream operating costs: Coordination and investment to improve downstream operating efficiency

We endow the downstream firm in a supply chain with operating costs in addition to the traditional overage and underage costs. We reanalyze Lariviere and Porteus's "Selling to a Newsvendor" model (2001), allowing for non-linear production costs, and provide comparative statics. We then explore investment in reducing downstream operating costs. To overcome the fact that investment is lower in a decentralized chain than in an integrated one, we propose several coordination mechanisms-buybacks, revenue sharing and operating subsidy with a license fee. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.