Postponement Strategies in Supply Chain Management

Yingxue Zhao received his Ph.D. degree in Management Sciences and En- gineering from Institute of Systems Science, Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), in 2010. He is currently associate professor of Supply Chain Management at School of International Trade and Economics of University of International Business and Economics. He has received some academic awards including the "Outstanding Paper Award" awarded by IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics (SMC) and the "Excellent Research Award for Scientific Research of Universities (Humanities and Social Sciences)" awarded by Ministry of Education of China. His research interests mainly focus on Supply Chain Management, particularly on Supply Chain Contract. His research papers have been published in journals including Production and Operations Management, European Journal of Operational Research, Annals of Operations Research, International Journal of Production Research, Journal of the Operational Research Society, Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications, and International Journal of Production Economics. Xiaoge Meng received her Master degree in Mathematics from College of Science, Shantou University, in 2006. During the Master period, her research interests mainly focused on Complex Analysis and Harmonic Analysis. Research papers of the relevant fields have been published in journals including Abstract and Applied Analysis, Applied Mathematics and Computation, and Journal of Systems Science and Complexity. Currently, as a Ph.D. student of School of Economics and Management at Beijing University of Aeronautics & Astronautics, her research interests have transferred to the area of Supply Chain Management. Over the years, she has received some academic awards including the "Excellent Paper Award" awarded by the 10th Annual Meeting of the Chinese Logistics Society (CLS). Shouyang Wang received his Ph.D. degree in Operations Research from Institute of Systems Science of Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in 1986. He is currently a Bairen distinguished professor of Management Science at Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science of CAS and the Lotus distinguished professor of Management Science of Hunan University at Changsha. He is also an adjunct professor of over 30 universities in the world. He is/was the editor- in-chief, an area editor or a co-editor of 15 journals including Information and Management and Energy Economics. He was/is a guest editor for a special issue/volume of over 20 journals including European Journal of Operational Research, Annals of Operations Research, IIE Transactions, and Decision Support Systems. He has published 30 monographs and over 250 papers in leading journals. His current research interests include Supply Chain Management, Financial Engineering, Economic Forecasting, and Decision Analysis. T. C. Edwin Cheng is Dean of the Faculty of Business, Fung Yiu King Wing Hang Bank Endowed Professor in Business Administration, and Chair Professor of Management at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He obtained a B.Sc.[Eng](First Class Honours) from the University of Hong Kong, an M.Sc. from the University of Birmingham, U.K., and a Ph.D. and an Sc.D. from the University of Cambridge, U.K. He has previously taught in Canada, England, and Singapore. Prof. Cheng's research interests are in Operations Management and Operations Research. He has published over 600 papers in such journals as California Management Review, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, Journal of Management Information Systems, Journal of Operations Management, Management Science, MIS Quarterly, Operations Research, Organization Science, Production and Operations Management, and SIAM Journal on Optimization. He has co-authored 11 books published by Chapman and Hall, McGraw-Hill, and Springer. He received the Outstanding Young Engineer of the Year Award from the Institute of Industrial Engineers, U.S.A., in 1992 and the Croucher Award (t