Revenue sharing contracts in a supply chain: A literature review

This paper is the first to review the issue of revenue-sharing contract (RSC) in a supply chain management. This contract has gained excessive popularity over the last two decades, since it coordinates the supply chain. Two formats of this contract are primarily used in practice and are thoroughly investigated in the literature: (i) a wholesale-price contract with an added revenue-sharing mechanism; (ii) a consignment contract with revenue sharing. The latter format is used by mega platform distributors such as Apple iTunes, Google Play and Amazon. To evaluate developments and directions of this research area, this survey provides a content analysis of 68 carefully identified papers that address various aspects of RSC in Operations Research and Operations Management. Our survey classifies the reviewed papers according these aspects and provides mathematical formulation for different variants of these two major formats of RSC. It also provides opportunities to identify gaps in the literature that could be fulfilled as well as potentials for further research directions.