Paola Modesti

Large retailers and vertical control of the supply chain: private labels and private certification standards

In the last few decades, large retailers have become increasingly important and have radically altered the way value is created along the supply chain. Large retailers now control several phases of the production chain, through, among others, private labels and certification standards. The aim of the paper is to describe how recent strategies of large retailers are giving them dominance over producers in vertical control of the supply chain, thus, turning upside down the principal-agent relationship defined by theory and how, as a consequence, the retailer gross profits increase.

On SSB Utility Theory

The SSB functional is interpreted as the difference between two probabilities. This interpretation allows one to represent preference relationships with no use of a utility function and agrees with a recent interpretation of expected utility advanced by Castagnoli and Li Calzi.

Imitation, stock markets and Stackelberg games

There is a wide literature about the behaviour of agents in a stock-market in the presence of imitation phenomena. Some issues may be treated in a game-theory context. In particular, we consider a micro-model of stock-market speculator and formalise it in a Stackelberg game. The problem consists in maximising the utility of two agents (called Leader and Follower) under the assumption that the latter also takes into account the Leaders opinion on the future value of a stock. The results show new relations between the optimal policies of the two agents.