Supplier-buyer contracting: Asymmetric cost information and cutoff level policy for buyer participation

We consider the problem of designing a contract to maximize the supplier's profit in a one-supplier–one-buyer relationship for a short-life-cycle product. Demand for the finished product is stochastic and price-sensitive, and only its probability distribution is known when the supply contract is written. When the supplier has complete information on the marginal cost of the buyer, we show that several simple contracts can induce the buyer to choose order quantity that attains the single firm profit maximizing solution, resulting in the maximum possible profit for the supplier. When the marginal cost of the buyer is private information, we show that it is no longer possible to achieve the single firm solution. In this case, the optimal order quantity is always smaller while the optimal sale price of the finished product is higher than the single firm solution. The supplier's profit is lowered while that of the buyer is improved. Moreover, a buyer who has a lower marginal cost will extract more profit from the supplier. Under the optimal contract, the supplier employs a cutoff level policy on the buyer's marginal cost to determine whether the buyer should be induced to sign the contract. We characterize the optimal cutoff level and show how it depends on the parameters of the problem. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 48: 41–64, 2001