Utilizing incentives to mitigate supply risk has become one of the most important research issues in supply chain management. In this paper, we consider a decentralized supply chain that consists of one manufacturer and one supplier. The manufacturer is ambiguous on the distribution of the supplier’s random production capacity, where the supplier can exert an unobservable effort for capacity improvement and has private information about its effort cost. We introduce uncertain parameters of the capacity distribution within an ellipsoidal uncertainty set. Based on the principal-agent theory, we investigate how the manufacturer designs robust sourcing contracts to incentivize the supplier. Importantly, we obtain a closed-form solution of the optimal robust sourcing contract. We show that, regardless of the information structure, the optimal wholesale price is always increasing in the degree of parameter uncertainty. Under asymmetric information, we find that a bunching contract, rather than a menu of contracts, is optimal. By comparing the manufacturer’s optimal profit under asymmetric information with that under symmetric information, we examine the value of information and how it is influenced by the related factors. We show that the value of information is increasing as the difference in the supplier’s effort costs (or the proportion of a more cost-efficient supplier) increases. Overall, the findings of our paper provide useful guidelines for manufacturers to mitigate supply risk in many practical situations.

利用激励措施降低供应风险已成为供应链管理中最重要的研究问题之一。在本文中，我们考虑由一个制造商和一个供应商组成的分散供应链。制造商对供应商随机生产能力的分布是不明确的，供应商可以为产能提高付出不可观察的努力，并且拥有有关其努力成本的私人信息。我们在椭球不确定性集中引入容量分布的不确定参数。基于委托代理理论，我们研究制造商如何设计稳健的采购合同来激励供应商。重要的是，我们获得了最佳鲁棒采购合同的封闭式解决方案。我们表明，无论信息结构如何，最优批发价格总是随着参数不确定性的程度而增加。在信息不对称的情况下，我们发现捆绑合约而不是合约菜单是最优的。通过比较非对称信息下和对称信息下制造商的最优利润，我们考察了信息的价值及其受相关因素的影响。我们表明，随着供应商努力成本差异（或更具成本效益的供应商比例）的增加，信息的价值也在增加。总体而言，我们论文的研究结果为制造商在许多实际情况下降低供应风险提供了有用的指导。