Narrow Results

We examine an option contract from a supplier’s perspective and apply mean-variance method to analyze the supplier’s risk. Compared with the newsvendor model without an option contract, we theoretically prove that the option contract can also benefit the supplier. We find for a given option exercise price, there exists an option price such that the contract with the option price dominates those with smaller option price in terms of mean variance of the supplier’s profit. Computational studies have also been conducted in the paper.