Product Design Strategies For Differentiated Demands Of Customers In Supply Chain

The development of global economic and network technology bring to the changes of commercial environment since the 1980s. The commercial environment changes from the steady and divinable environment to the complex and uncertain dynamic environment. The dynamic environment of enterprise competition is characterized with quickly changing market, differentiated and individuation demand. In the new dynamic environment, in order to win the competitive power, firms must provide diverse products to meet the differentiated demands of customers. The diverse products will induce the manufacturing complexity, which can bring fatal impact on equipments. Aiming at the differentiated demands of customers, firms should classify the customers which have similar purchasing behaviors into a market segment, and then design one product to satisfy the demand of this market segment.Along with the competition aggravation, one firm just depending on its resources to gain the competitive edge is very difficult. Many firms must cooperate among each other to achieve the integer competitive edge. The relationship among firms becomes more and more tightly, which forms a supply chain environment. Meanwhile, environmental protection is paid more and more attention, customers would like to change their purchasing behaviors, and governments also makes some environmental policies to motivate industries to design and development green product. Therefore, on the basis of satisfying the differentiated demands of customers, how to adopt appropriate product design strategy not only to ensure product differentiation, but also to reduce product manufacturing cost, and considering the impacts of supply chain environment and environmental policy into product design have crucial theoretical and realistic significances.Most of the related researches have focused on the product design problem of one monopolist firm in the view of modular, platform and commonality. Little attention has been invested in the impacts of supply chain environment, and environmental policy on product design problem. From the view of heterogeneity customer population, to meet the differentiated demands of customers in supply chain, this thesis first investigates the different product design strategies in supply chain environment or under the impacts of environmental policy.The organization of this thesis is as follows: In Chapter 1, we first introduce the background of this thesis, and review the researches on differentiated demands of customers and classification, as well as the literatures about product design strategies. Through analyzing the problem is current research, we propose the content and significance of this thesis. At the end of this chapter, research method and organization structure of this thesis are presented.In Chapter 2, the conventional support vector machine (SVM) is first introduced. For the binary classification problem with asymmetric cost of misclassification, though introducing some adjustable parameters into the model of the conventional SVM, we propose an asymmetric support vector machine (ASVM) and establish an explicit connection between the expected cost of misclassification and the adjustable parameters. At the end of this chapter, computational results verify the efficacy of ASVM compared with the conventional SVM and the method proposed in the previous literature.In Chapter 3, the product design strategy based on component commonality is investigated. The design configuration with commonality can lower manufacturing cost, but it can also reduce product differentiation and revenue. This chapter investigates the condition under which component commonality is profitable product design strategy for a firm in the supply chain environment. Facing two market segments with different valuations of quality, a stylized model of a manufacturer who designs a product family consisting of two products is constructed, and then, the optimal product design strategy under different conditions is presented. A numerical example is used to illustrate how some supply chain parameters impact the optimal product design strategy.Chapter 4 investigates the product design strategy in a distribution supply chain channel consisting of an upstream manufacturer and a downstream retailer. In a distribution supply chain channel, product design strategy of a manufacturer depends not only on its own decisions, but also the behaviors of its upstream and downstream partners along the channel. By considering the interactions between the manufacturer and the retailer, this chapter first describes the product design problem as a manufacturer-dominant Stackelberg game, and presents the optimal product design strategy. To improve the performance of the supply chain, the revenue-sharing contract is then introduced into the product design problem. At the end, numerical experiments illustrate the impacts of customer characteristics on the optimal product design strategies.In Chapter 5, the green product design strategy to satisfy the differentiated demands of considering the environmental problem of customers is studied. Development of industry enriches people's life, but it also induces environmental pollution, which has been significantly concerned by governments, customers and firms. Firms should reconsider its primary product design strategy including green product. By jointly considering interactions among customers'different preferences, producers'product strategies, and governments'environmental policies, a product design strategy model under the constraint of environmental policy is presented, and results indicate that the optimal product design strategy may not most benefit the environment. And then, subsidy and tax polices are introduced, under these policies, the firm would develop green product.Chapter 6 concludes this thesis and gives some feasible directions for further investigation.Innovations and contributions of this thesis are briefly summarized as follows:(1) By introducing some adjustable parameters, an asymmetric support vector machine is proposed to solve the binary classification problem with asymmetric cost of misclassification. This method constructs a classifier to minimize the expected cost of misclassification, which can effectively segment the consumers according to their features, consumption patterns, and purchasing behaviors. Market segmentation can provide useful information for product design decisions of firms.(2) The design configuration with commonality can lower manufacturing cost, but it can also reduce product differentiation and firm's revenue. By considering this impact of component commonality, a theoretical model of product design based on component commonality is constructed. And then the condition of commonality being profitable is given, which can provide theoretical support for firms to decide whether to adopt component commonality.(3) For product design problem in a distribution supply chain channel, by considering the interaction between a manufacturer and a retailer, we construct a dynamic game model for product design decision, and then give the optimal product design strategy. At the same time, a revenue-sharing contract is introduced to the product design problem in the distribution channel, and it can perfectly coordinate the distribution channel in the product design problem. (4) By jointly considering interactions among customers'different preferences, producers'product strategies, and governments'environmental policies, a product design strategy model under the constraint of environmental policy is proposed. These results can provide a theoretical basis for firms to remake their product design strategies under the condition of environmental protection, which also can give some insights for policymakers.