Abstract:

In recent years， frequent large-scale natural disasters （such as floods， typhoons， earthquakes） and public emergencies （such as COVID-19 epidemic） have brought increasing challenges to China’s relief materials reserve system. In order to enlarge the supply capacity of relief materials in “urgent” time period and reduce the excessive waste resulted by expiration of the relief materials in “ordinary” time period， a new joint reserve model based on a delegated reserve contract with option is proposed between a government and an agent enterprise. In the model， the stochastic programming method and game theory is used and the two factors of reserve cost and relief satisfaction value are simultaneously considered. Moreover， the maximization of the government’s relief satisfaction value and the agent enterprise’s profit is the decision-making objective， and the government’s subsidy and the agent enterprise’s flexible quantity of the relief materials are the decision-making variables. As a result， the optimal subsidy strategy of the government and the optimal flexible reserve strategy of the agent enterprise are provided， respectively. The main results show that： （1） Only when the probability of the government purchasing the flexible materials of the agent enterprise is big enough， or it is in a moderate range and the unit subsidy is greater than a certain threshold， the agent enterprise will reserve flexible materials and the quantity of flexible materials is positively correlated with the unit subsidy； （2） When the agent enterprise reserves flexible materials， as the minimum quantity of relief materials with option increases， the agent enterprise’s expected profit increases first and then decreases， and the optimal flexible quantity of relief materials decreases， as well as the optimal unit subsidy level and the government’s expected relief satisfaction value； （3） The optimal unit subsidy and flexible quantity of relief materials are positively correlated with the difference of the relief satisfaction values between the relief materials with option and temporarily purchased materials. Finally， a numerical example is given to further illustrate the impact of relevant factors on the optimal strategies， and the corresponding management insights are provided.

Key words: relief materials, joint reserve, option, reserve subsidy, relief satisfaction value