Incentives to Enhance Production Reliability against Disruption: Cost-Sharing vs. Penalty

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The manuscript focuses on an interesting question about product disruption in supply chains. The selected approach is well chosen and well applied. I just have a minor comment regarding the discussion around your results.

From my point of view, a missing point is the length of the supply chain. If it is a local supply chain, I think that your results are very fine, because the retailer and the manufacturer have more opportunities to directly interact. However, in the context of global supply chains, where retailers and manufacturers are not directly connected, the production disruption can also be the result of external events (for instance an armed conflict) or the disruption of its own suppliers and not just related to the technology adopted by the manufacturer.

To sum up, I think that it is not sufficient to introduce a stochastic demand, you also need a stochastic environmental context to provide a comprehensive view of your research question.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The manuscript proposes an interesting analysis of production reliability management illustrating a strategy based on penalties to the manufacturer to improve the production process reliability.

The manuscript is well written and organized. However, it presents several critical flaws that need to be addressed before considering it for publication.

In the description of the methodology, a flow diagram illustrating the proposed strategy and comparing it with the traditional cost-sharing approach could help the reader better understand the research approach and novelty.

Besides the theoretical model description, a practical case study should be included in order to demonstrate both the usability of the proposed approach as well as its tangible benefits versus the cost-sharing approach.

A third important criticality is related to the research context compared to the journal’s topics and target audience. Actually, there is no evidence of sustainability implications of the current study. The Authors should discuss the sustainability implications of their study, e.g. taking into account that the reduction of the risks related to the low reliability of the manufacturer/provider has beneficial effects in terms of both costs and environmental impact as stated by https://doi.org/10.3390/su14042235.

The discussion of results should be augmented, better highlighting both the practical and methodological implications of the study.

When a study is cited in the text explicitly (e.g. line 127 “A recent study by [26] extended..”) the name/names of the Author/s should be indicated, i.e. “A recent study by Gupta and Ivanov [26] extended…”.

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

The Authors have satisfactorily improved the quality of the manuscript. Hence, it can be considered for publication.