Duality Approaches to Economic Lot-Sizing Games

35 Pages Posted: 3 Nov 2008

See all articles by Xin Chen

Xin Chen

New York University (NYU)

Jiawei Zhang

affiliation not provided to SSRN

Date Written: May 2007

Abstract

We consider the economic lot-sizing (ELS) game with general concave ordering cost.In this cooperative game, multiple retailers form a coalition by placing joint orders to asingle supplier in order to reduce ordering cost. When both the inventory holding costand backlogging cost are linear functions, it can be shown that the core of this game isnon-empty. The main contribution of this paper is to show that a core allocation canbe computed in polynomial time. Our approach is based on linear programming (LP) duality and is motivated by the work of Owen [19]. We suggest an integer programming formulation for the ELS problem and show that its LP relaxation admits zero integrality gap, which makes it possible to analyze the ELS game by using LP duality. We show that, there exists an optimal dual solution that defines an allocation in the core.An interesting feature of our approach is that it is not necessarily true that everyoptimal dual solution defines a core allocation. This is in contrast to the duality approach for other known cooperative games in the literature.

Suggested Citation

Chen, Xin and Zhang, Jiawei, Duality Approaches to Economic Lot-Sizing Games (May 2007). NYU Working Paper No. OM-2006-01, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1293131

Xin Chen

New York University (NYU) ( email )

Bobst Library, E-resource Acquisitions
20 Cooper Square 3rd Floor
New York, NY 10003-711
United States

Jiawei Zhang

affiliation not provided to SSRN

No Address Available

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