Cooperation on capacitated inventory situations with fixed holding costs

Abstract

In this paper we analyze a situation in which several firms deal with inventory problems concerning the same type of product. We consider that each firm uses its limited capacity warehouse for storing purposes and that it faces an economic order quantity model where storage costs are irrelevant (and assumed to be zero) and shortages are allowed. In this setting, we show that firms can save costs by placing joint orders and obtain an optimal order policy for the firms. Besides, we identify an associated class of costs games which we show to be concave. Finally, we introduce and study a rule to share the costs among the firms which provides core allocations and can be easily computed.