A Study On Pricing Strategy In Dual-channel Supply Chain Considering The Behavior Of Traders

With the global economic growth and the popularity of the Internet technology, E-commerce is growing with unprecedented speed on a global scale. E-commerce has not only changed people's consumption patterns and shopping patterns, but also expanded the distribution channels. In the face of ever-changing market demand environment, few companies can only rely on a single channel to outmaneuver. A combination of the electronic channel and traditional channel, i.e. dual-channel distribution, has become an essential choice for enterprises. The dual-channel supply chain has been widely recognized and is showing its great potential and a broad space for development. Therefore, to provide in-depth understanding and implementation of dual-channel for enterprises, research on the dual-channel supply chain business operation strategies has important theoretical and practical significance.This dissertation takes the behavior of traders into consideration and studies decision problem of dual-channel supply chain from several different perspectives, including cooperative and competitive behavior, information sharing behavior, customer strategy behavior and customer returns behavior. Specifically, the content can be abstracted as follows:(1)Under one-to-one dual-channel supply chain environment, the cooperation and competition behavior of manufacturer and retailer are studied. Two mathematical models of consistent pricing and inconsistent pricing in different behavior are compared. After deriving the optimal decision of manufacturer and retailer with different risk attitudes, this dissertation presents the boundary conditions of manufacturer and retailer to adopt cooperative behavior under different pricing model. The profit distribution mechanism in cooperation behavior is analyzed. We find that in inconsistent pricing scheme, the optimal direct channel price, retail channel price and the expected demand of two channels are not influenced by cooperate and competition behaviors of retailer and manufacturer, but influenced by risk aversion of two parties. If the manufacturer and retailer adopt a cooperative behavior, retailer will get lower wholesale price. Consumers can get more social welfare from the competitive behavior of the risk-neutral members in consistent pricing scheme. Manufacturer and retailer are willing to adopt a cooperative behavior under certain conditions to mitigate channel conflict effectively.(2)With respect to information-sharing behavior of manufacturer and retailer, a two-stage game model of the dual-channel supply chain is established, in which the demand is derived from the real price of each channel. The optimal pricing strategies of three cases--the centralized case, decentralized with and without information sharing cases were compared. The results show that the income of manufacturer and retailer are subject to the prediction accuracy. Due to the manufacturer Stackelberg game played between manufacturer and retailer, whether the manufacturer is willing to share information or not, the forecast information will be shared passively. With second-mover advantage, the retailer will always determine his forecast demand information based on information sharing. The information-sharing behavior of retailer depends on his information value. The boundary conditions are presented when the retailer is willing to share his information according to his information value.(3)Taking the consumer strategy behavior into consideration, we divide the consumer market into two kinds:myopic and strategic. Two-stage pricing strategies are analyzed in the context of traditional supply chain and dual-channel supply chain. The impact of customer strategic behavior on price and expected profit are discussed. By compassion of the case with customer of the same type, we show that pricing strategy in dual channel is affected by consumer types and consumer groups, which is the same with traditional supply chain. But under certain conditions, manufacturer and retailer will better off in the presence of strategic consumers, which is different from the situation in traditional supply chain. (4)When customer return behavior exists both in retail channel and direct channel, the game models in single retail channel, single direct channel and dual channel are constructed respectively. The price equilibriums and conditions in two different return policies (cooperative return and returning goods to manufacturer) were analyzed. The influence of customer return behavior on supply chain pricing, channel demand and profits are assessed and further verified by numerical calculation. Results show that when consumer returns exists, dual-channel supply chain do better than a single channel; in dual channel environment, cooperative return policy get a higher retail sales but less direct sales. When consumer return rate in direct channel is greater than the rate in retail channel, the retail channel price is higher and direct channel price is lower in manufacturer return policy compared with the case in cooperative return policy. Supply chain get more profit in cooperative return policy, namely, in order to increase the overall profits of the supply chain, supply chain members must work closely to develop a reasonable strategy to deal with the consumer return problem.