The Role of Salesforce Incentives in Supply Chain Management

My dissertation includes two business scenarios addressing the role of salesforce incentives in supply chain management.

We study the pricing issue in chapter 3. We propose a model which includes a menu of contracts with price, which was left out in Chen (2005), as a decision variable for the firm.

The firm needs to make both the pricing decision and the production quantity decision in the face of lack of information about the market condition.

We augment Gonik's (1978) scheme by adding price and compare it with other forms of contracts.

We derive analytical results to obtain optimal policies regarding salesforce motivation parameters, pricing and quantity.

We study the chain to chain competition issue in chapter 4.

We investigate contracting, salesforce incentives, and inventory planning in two competing supply chains, each consisting of one manufacturer and one salesforce.

The two supply chains are identical, except that they may have different contract types.

This topic is studied through using a non-cooperative game method.

In the first stage, the manufacturers decide which contract type to choose.

Then, in the next stage, given the contract type structure created in the first stage, the manufacturers offer contracts to their salesforces and the salesforces engage in a competition.

We analyze the game for two different contract types---a single linear contract and a menu of linear contracts.

We study the market selection issue in chapter 5. We consider a firm that offers a product for a single selling season.

The firm has the flexibility to select which market demand sources to satisfy, where each demand source is a random variable.

Each market's demand distribution can be influenced by the level of the sales effort used by the sales agent within each market.

The sales agents are compensated by the realized sales in various markets.

We address appropriate methods to select market. We also examine the effect of budgetary constraints.

Results of extensive numerical analysis are also presented.