The bullwhip effect and Lyapunov exponent

In a supply chain the variability of the orders received by the supplier can be greater than the demand variability. This phenomenon is named bullwhip effect. Some researchers are quantified the bullwhip by measuring the differences between observed variances in the different stages of the supply chain. In this paper, by using the Lyapunov exponent, a measure for bullwhip effect is proposed and by investigating the mathematical relations, some useful results on the behavior of the bullwhip effect are obtained.