PurposeThis paper aims to explore the effect of e‐marketplace on the supply chain's performance under the markdown policy. Profit and risk analyses are both conducted and channel coordination issues are examined.Design/methodology/approachThe paper presents a markdown policy supply chain analytical model with e‐marketplace and examines the optimal markdown policy. The mean‐variance theory is employed to study both the risk and profit residing in the supply chain. Extensive numerical analysis is conducted. The paper investigates both the cases when e‐marketplace selling price is exogenous and endogenous.FindingsThe markdown policy can coordinate the supply chain as long as the parameters satisfy certain analytical conditions. The expected profit and risk in the supply chain are both increased when e‐marketplace is introduced. The retailer shares a larger portion of the increased expected profit but at the same time bears a higher risk.Research limitations/implicationsIn this study, similar to the mainstream literature in the related area, the supply chain consists of one manufacturer and one retailer, and there is one single selling season with one product. Despite being able to generate interesting analytical results, this model fails to capture the more complicated real world practices.Practical implicationsThe existence of e‐marketplace can be beneficial to the whole supply chain in terms of expected profit improvement. When the expected profit increase brought about by e‐marketplace is large enough to compensate for both the operational cost of e‐marketplace and the increase of the risk, the retailer could consider introducing e‐marketplace to dispose of the excess inventory.Originality/valueThis paper is an original work. It is based on the reviewed literature and the model with markdown policy is new. This could be a reference for further research into optimal performance in the supply chain with e‐marketplace.

False failure returns are products which are returned to retailers by customers without functional or quality defect. The cost of a false failure return is significant and is incurred primarily by the manufacturer. However, reducing false failure returns requires efforts primarily by the retailer. We research the problem of reducing the false failure returns by supply chain coordination methods. We introduce a target rebate contract presented by foreign researcher, which pays the retailer a specific sum per each unit false failure return below a predetermined target. This contract provides an incentive to the retailer to increase her effort, thus decreasing the number of false failure returns and increasing the expected profit of the whole supply chain. Our research shows this contract is Pareto-improving in most cases and is beneficial to both manufacturer and retailer in some specific cases.

The research on project management maturity model is divided into three phases: the research focusing on process, the research focusing on project management, and the research focusing on organization. Some of the main literatures in these three phases are introduced and some important project management maturity models are described and explained, what's more, the latest organizational project management maturity model (OPM3) is given a brief introduction. In the end, this paper reviews some of the Chinese scholars' research on project management maturity model and gives some prospects for the future research.

This paper explores the application of options in supply chain risk management when consumer demand is uncertain. The analysis is based on an environment involving a single supplier and multiple retailers. Each retailer can either buy product directly from the supplier, or purchase options on product. An option gives the retailer the right to buy an additional unit of product. We first derive optimal replenishment policies for the retailers, the optimal production policy for the supplier. We then show how options enhance information flows, encourage risk sharing, and improve supply chain efficiency. The paper includes a discussion of how options can be used to align the incentives of supply chain partners, and to improve supply chain responsiveness to changes in the business environment.