Abstract Increased transportation costs and tense competition necessitate that carriers coordinate with the other members of the supply chain for realizing potential savings due to channel coordination. We address such coordination issues in an operational setting where a carrier is to ship the items within a two-echelon supply channel consisting of a supplier (e.g., manufacturer) and a buyer (e.g., retailer) operating under the assumptions of the traditional economic order quantity (EOQ) problem setting. We consider the case where the supplier-buyer pair is operated in a centralized fashion, potentially under a Vendor-Managed Inventory (VMI) agreement, and, hence, referred to as the supplier-buyer partnership, whereas the carrier is a separate entity. We examine the optimal solutions of the parties under various freight schedules, i.e., transportation pricing mechanisms, including freight discounts, fixed charges for each shipment, and fixed charges for each truck used in the delivery. Our goal is to identify alternative transportation pricing contracts serving the carrier and supplier-buyer partnership from the carrier’s perspective and coordinating the supply chain system at hand. We find that freight discounts and per shipment fixed charges may not offer an effective contractual mechanism, and sometimes it is better for the carrier to offer negative discounts or fixed rewards per shipment. We also show that asking for a fixed charge per truck would always motivate the supplier-buyer partnership to operate at the centralized solution if the carrier sets the fixed charge per truck equal the fixed cost per truck reflecting its own operating costs in the asking price and achieving positive profits through the additional per unit freight rate. In an extensive numerical study, we benchmark the cost efficiency of centralized versus decentralized channels and illustrate that the benefits of the three transportation pricing mechanisms considered in this paper.

中文翻译：

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供应商-承运商-买方渠道：为供应商-买方合作关系服务的承运商的合同定价

摘要 运输成本的增加和激烈的竞争要求承运人与供应链的其他成员进行协调，以通过渠道协调实现潜在的节约。我们在运营环境中解决此类协调问题，其中承运人将在由供应商（例如，制造商）和买方（例如，零售商）组成的两梯队供应渠道中运送物品，在传统经济秩序的假设下运营数量 (EOQ) 问题设置。我们考虑供应商-买方对以集中方式运营的情况，可能根据供应商管理库存 (VMI) 协议，因此称为供应商-买方伙伴关系，而承运人是一个单独的实体。我们检查各方在各种货运时间表下的最优解，即，运输定价机制，包括运费折扣、每批货物的固定费用以及交付中使用的每辆卡车的固定费用。我们的目标是从承运人的角度确定为承运人和供应商-买方伙伴关系服务的替代运输定价合同，并协调手头的供应链系统。我们发现运费折扣和每批货物的固定费用可能无法提供有效的合同机制，有时承运人最好为每批货物提供负折扣或固定奖励。我们还表明，如果承运人将每辆卡车的固定费用设置为等于每辆卡车的固定成本，在要价中反映其自身的运营成本，那么要求每辆卡车收取固定费用将始终激励供应商-买方合作伙伴在集中解决方案中运营。通过增加每单位运价实现正利润。在广泛的数值研究中，我们对集中与分散渠道的成本效率进行了基准测试，并说明了本文中考虑的三种运输定价机制的好处。