Pricing Decisions For Substitutable Products In Fuzzy Environments

With the globalization of world economy and highly competitive market,it has become more and more common for substitutable products. Differentchannel power among firms is an in?uence on pricing for substitutable products.On the other hand, many fuzzy uncertain factors that are usually associatedwith the product supply, production and sales also have in?uence on pricing forsubstitutable products. Motivated by above, this dissertation considers pricingdecisions for substitutable products based on different channel power structuresin fuzzy environments by using fuzzy sets theory, game theory and optimizationtheory.This dissertation considers a supply chain consisting of one manufacturerand two competitive retailers. The manufacturer produces two substitutableproducts and wholesales them to the two competitive retailers respectively, whothen sell them to end consumers. The consumer demands and manufacturingcosts are uncertainty, which are described by fuzziness. Based on different mar-ket power structures between one manufacturer and two retailers, four expectedvalue models are developed to determine the pricing decision for the substitutableproducts: one centralized decision model and three decentralized game models(i.e., two Stackelberg game models and one Nash game model), and the corre-sponding analytical equilibrium solutions are obtained. Furthermore, the effectsof two retailers'different competitive behaviors―Cournot, Collusion and Stack-elberg―on the optimal pricing decisions of the manufacturer and two retailersthemselves are analyzed.This dissertation also considers this scenario: there are two substitutableproducts produced by two competitive manufacturers respectively and then soldby one common retailer to the consumers. Both the customer demand and themanufacturing cost for each product are characterized as fuzzy variables. Howthe two manufacturers and the common retailer make their own pricing decisionsabout wholesale prices and retail prices are explored under different market power structures between two manufacturers and one common retailer. The effectsof two manufacturers'different competitive behaviors―Cournot, Collusion andStackelberg―on the optimal decisions of the manufacturers and common retailerare also analyzed.Numerical examples are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the the-oretical results, moreover to gain some managerial insights through the compar-ative analysis of the corresponding results.