Vertical Contracts in a Supply Chain and the Bullwhip Effect
研究发现，上游企业使用线性批发价格的分散式供应链，其上游生产和下游销售波动可能低于垂直整合供应链，且牛鞭效应更弱，原因是存在价格效应，但下游企业可能受损，整体利润可能下降。
This paper shows that decentralized supply chains, in which upstream firms use linear wholesale prices, may experience lower upstream production and downstream sales volatility than vertically integrated supply chains and may be less susceptible to the bullwhip effect by which the variance of upstream production exceeds the variance of downstream sales. The reason is that decentralized supply chains exhibit a price effect, whereby upstream producers raise wholesale prices in the case of positive demand shocks and lower wholesale prices in the case of negative demand shocks. Whereas upstream producers benefit from the price effect and, thus, from a dampening of the bullwhip effect, downstream firms may lose, and overall supply chain profit may decrease. This paper was accepted by Vishal Gaur, operations management.