Incentive Mechanisms for Inventory Control and Promotion Planning in Value Chain Management

Today's value chains consist of multiple economic agents interacting at different levels so that a product or service is delivered to its end customers in an efficient fashion. This dissertation explores the role of incentives in better coordinating such complex value chain operations on the supply and demand sides of the market. In particular, we study inventory and promotion mechanisms, which firms can use to facilitate demand information sharing to better manage inventory upstream and boost customer demand by providing temporary price incentives in a sales promotion downstream, respectively. We adopt a data-driven approach in that we propose statistical frameworks that incorporate real-time data, and which can be used by decision makers to design and measure the impact of offering such incentives.