Impact of Supply Risk Sharing on Supply Chains: Multiplicative vs. Additive Risks

Abstract We consider a supply chain in which a retailer orders from a manufacturer(s) who face(s) a stochastic supply risk (random yield) under single or dual-sourcing cases. In specific, we look into this problem in two different yield risks: multiplicative and additive. One might intuit that if the retailer shares a manufacturer’s random yield risk with the manufacturer, the manufacturer will be better off. Interestingly, we confirm that this intuition is only valid in the additive yield risk but not necessarily in the multiplicative yield risk. Moreover, under dual sourcing, both manufacturers fiercely compete on their prices (i.e., Bertrand-like competition) to become the sole source in the additive yield risk, but the manufacturers do not compete as much in the multiplicative yield risk. Lastly, this paper shows that the supply chain inefficiency may decrease (increase) as risk-sharing increases in the additive risk model under dual sourcing (single sourcing) while it does not changeinthemultiplicativeriskmodel. Key words: supply risk, random yield, dual sourcing, game theory JEL Classification: L11, M11, M21