Optimization and Coordination of Crowdsourcing Supply Chain in Fast Fashion Industry

Abstract EN

Due to inadequate designers in fast fashion industry and the development of the Internet, small-and-medium-sized garment makers have gradually turned to external talents to enhance their new product design efficiency via crowdsourcing initiative.

This paper presents a new framework of crowdsourcing supply chain for fast fashion industry.

First, a basic multiperiod order model is established in a crowdsourcing supply chain system, where a garment maker chooses the best one among available solutions submitted by online designers (i.e., crowdsources) in each period, then transforms it into finished product, and sells to consumers through a retailer.

Second, we extend this model by integrating the factors of capital turnover, the retailer’s risk-aversion, and the garment maker’s minimum production quantity.

Moreover, utilizing wholesale price, buyback, and profit-sharing scheme designs a mixed contract for coordinating crowdsourcees, retailer, and garment maker of crowdsourcing supply chain for achieving Pareto optimality.

The models help the garment maker determining the optimal production quantities of crowdsourcing designed products and enable the retailer placing the optimum orders and setting the reasonable risk level.

In addition, we also find that the incentive policy for crowdsourcing designers can be fulfilled by using a profit-sharing scheme with a piecewise function of order quantity instead of a linear function.