Technical Note—A Stationary Infinite-Horizon Supply Contract Under Asymmetric Inventory Information
研究下游零售商私藏库存信息时，上游供应商如何设计长期静态合同，提出基于变分法的优化方法，并应用于批量订货合同场景。
A New Approach to Contract Design with Private Inventory Information In a typical decentralized supply chain, a downstream retailer privately observes its inventory level and has an informational advantage over the upstream supplier. In “A Stationary Infinite-Horizon Supply Contract Under Asymmetric Inventory Information” by Bensoussan, Sethi, and Wang, the authors study how to optimally design a stationary, truth-telling, long-term contract in such a setting. In contrast to the classic first order approach in literature, they formulate the contract design as an optimization over a functional space and develop a solution approach based on the calculus of variations. They further apply their necessary optimality condition to the class of batch-order contracts, which replenish a prespecified inventory quantity for a fixed payment in each period only when the retailer has zero inventory on hand.