Managing Quality Risk in a Decentralized Supply Chain: Contractual Incentives and Product Recall Insurance
研究了分散式供应链中，采购合同如何通过预防性激励和增强性激励协调供应商的质量改进与买方的检验努力，并发现引入产品召回保险能补充激励、改善风险分担并提升供应链绩效。
We consider a two-echelon decentralized supply chain where the probability of selling nondefective products depends on the supplier’s quality improvement and the buyer’s inspection efforts. Products assembled from defective components cause a recall that leads to external failure costs for the buyer. Both players’ efforts are not contractible and it is a challenge to align inspection and quality-improvement efforts in a decentralized supply chain. We find that a procurement contract can provide preventive incentives that induce high inspection efforts and enhancing incentives that enable the supplier to credibly commit to high-quality components. However, these contractual incentives only align two players’ efforts under certain conditions. Interestingly, our findings suggest that introducing a product recall (PR) insurance requirement into a standard procurement contract provided by the buyer can complement enhancing incentives and lead to quality improvement in components. More importantly, as PR insurance can improve the flexibility of risk-sharing arrangements between the supplier and the buyer, we show that it can also serve as a coordinating role in improving the performance of a decentralized supply chain.