In todays global economy, supply chains are an essential ingredient to corporate survival and growth. Operations strategy in supply chains must assume an ever-expanding and strategic role of risks that modern enterprises face when they operate in an interdependent supply chain environment. These operational and strategic facets entail a brand new set of operational problems and risks that have not always been understood or managed very well. It falls to supply chain managers to identify and to educate corporate managers on what these critical operational problems and risks involve. This book provides business students and practitioners with the means to understand, to model and to analyze these outstanding issues and problems that are the essential elements in managing supply chains today. This book will consider these problems in depth and draw essential conclusions regarding their management in supply chains. As a textbook treatment, it will examine traditional operational problems, expressing them in a strategic context, understanding their complexity, and recognizing their interdependency with other firms within a supply-chain environment. Used throughout the book will be application examples that illustrate all the aspects of dealing with and solving these kinds of problems. The content of SUPPLY CHAIN GAMES: Operations Management and Risk Valuation is presented in three sections, each of which will emphasize important facets of supply chain management operations. (1) Supply chains and operations modeling and management section will provide static and time models and their gradual extension to a supply chain environment. The section will give special attention to the new concerns and issues at this level of analysis. (2) Inter-temporal supply chain management section will address this aspect as differential games. The differential games will be presented as natural continuous-time extensions of static models so that the effect of various types of dynamics on supply chains can be assessed and insights can be developed. (3) Risk and supply chain management section will deal with risk and supply chains as well as providing numerous applications regarding the management of interdependent operations and quality in a supply chain environment.
