The extant supply chain management literature has not addressed the issue of coordination in supply chains involving risk‐averse agents. We take up this issue and begin with defining a coordinating contract as one that results in a Pareto‐optimal solution acceptable to each agent. Our definition generalizes the standard one in the risk‐neutral case. We then develop coordinating contracts in three specific cases: (i) the supplier is risk neutral and the retailer maximizes his expected profit subject to a downside risk constraint; (ii) the supplier and the retailer each maximizes his own mean‐variance trade‐off; and (iii) the supplier and the retailer each maximizes his own expected utility. Moreover, in case (iii), we show that our contract yields the Nash Bargaining solution. In each case, we show how we can find the set of Pareto‐optimal solutions, and then design a contract to achieve the solutions. We also exhibit a case in which we obtain Pareto‐optimal sharing rules explicitly, and outline a procedure to obtain Pareto‐optimal solutions.

W e investigate how a supply chain involving a risk-neutral supplier and a downside-risk-averse retailer can be coordinated with a supply contract. We show that the standard buy-back or revenue-sharing contracts may not coordinate such a channel. Using a definition of coordination of supply chains proposed earlier by the authors, we design a risk-sharing contract that offers the desired downside protection to the retailer, provides respective reservation profits to the agents, and accomplishes channel coordination.

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The newsvendor problem with pricing decision provides an important vehicle for examining how operational problems interacts with marketing issues to influence decision-making at the firm level. This paper considers the newsvendor problem with pricing and its extensions. We try to answer two questions: (1) how to model the price-dependent stochastic demand and (2) how to derive the combined pricing and inventory solutions. We identify a class of demand functions which can result in well behaved profit functions. A demand function can be divided into two parts: the mean demand and random demand. If the part of mean demand has increasing price elasticity (IPE) and the part of random demand has generalized strict increasing failure rate (GSIFR), then the expected profit of the newsvendor is unimodal or quasi-concave. This appears generalizing the existent models in the literature.