Supply chain coordination mechanisms under flexible contracts

In supply chain management,an important research direction is to coordinate the supply chain through introducing flexible contracts.A supply chain contract is flexible if it can satisfy two conditions at the same time:the supply chain is coordinated,and the total profit of the supply chain can be arbitrarily divided between the supply chain members.This paper puts out two contracts,a flexible return contract and a flexible wholesale price discount contract.In contrast to many of literature,the supply chain contracts with an endogenous wholesale price is specifically considered,and a detailed sensitivity analysis of the contract parameters is given.The paper also discusses the application of the contract in vendor-managed inventory(VMI) mode.The results show that the supply chain’s performance is improved after introducing above contracts.All the findings are illustrated by numerical examples.