A number of factors, including developments in Internet-based commerce and third-party logistics, have led many companies to consider engaging in direct sales. Such a company may at once be both a supplier to and a direct competitor of any existing reseller partners (e.g., land-based retailers), which can result in "channel conflict." This can have momentous implications for distribution strategy.To generate managerial insights into this important issue, we develop a model that captures key attributes of such a setting, including various sources of inefficiency. We examine these in detail and identify a number of counterintuitive structural properties. For instance, the addition of a direct channel alongside a reseller channel is not necessarily detrimental to the reseller, given the associated adjustment in the manufacturer's pricing. In fact, both parties can benefit.Finally, we examine ways to adjust the manufacturer-reseller relationship that have been observed in industry. These include changes in wholesale pricing, paying the reseller a commission for diverting customers toward the direct channel, or conceding the demand fulfillment function entirely to the reseller. The latter two schemes could be mutually beneficial in that they achieve a division of labor according to each channel's competitive advantage.

This paper studies a distribution system in which a manufacturer supplies a common product to two independent retailers, who in turn use service as well as retail price to directly compete for end customers. We examine the drivers of each firm's strategy, and the consequences for total sales, market share, and profitability. We show that the relative intensity of competition with respect to each competitive dimension plays a key role, as does the degree of cooperation between the retailers. We discover a number of insights concerning the preferences of each party regarding competition. For instance, there will be circumstances under which both retailers would prefer an increase in competitive intensity. Our analysis generalizes existing knowledge about manufacturer wholesale pricing strategies, and rationalizes behaviors that would not be evident without both price and service competition. Finally, we characterize the structure of wholesale pricing mechanisms that can coordinate the system, and show that the most commonly used formats (those that are linear in the order quantity) can achieve coordination only under very limiting conditions.channels of distribution, supply chain management, coordination, competition, pricing, service levels, manufacturing/marketing interface

Customers for retail merchandise can often be satisfied with one of several items. Accounting for demand substitution in defining customer service influences the choice of items to stock and the optimal inventory level for each item stocked. Further, when certain items are not stocked, the resulting substitutions increase the demand for other items, which also affects the optimal stock levels. In this paper, we develop a probabilistic demand model for items in an assortment that captures the effects of substitution and a methodology for selecting item inventory levels so as to maximize total expected profit, subject to given resource constraints. Illustrative examples are solved to provide insights concerning the behavior of the optimal inventory policies, using the negative binomial demand distribution, which has performed well in fitting retail sales data.

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An important aspect of supply chain management is the optimal configuration of the supplier base. We develop a model to determine optimal lot sizes and the optimal number of suppliers when the yield of the product delivered from each supplier is random. While small orders from a large number of suppliers can reduce yield uncertainty, fixed costs associated with each supplier provide a penalty for having too many suppliers. This is the key tradeoff addressed by our model. We look at the cases when the suppliers are identical as well as nonidentical.