Channel Selection And Pricing Decision Of Sustainable Supply Chain With Remanufacturing And Trade-in Program

Due to the environment pollution and resource depletion,the sustainable supply chain incorporating used product recycling and reuse is increasingly given more and more attention from different stakeholders.However,in recent years the development of economy and technology has greatly changed the environment and the operation mode of supply chains in the following ways.Firstly,the electronic commerce offers various new channels(e.g.,the online marketplace and the secondhand market)for the used and the remanufactured product.Secondly,the trade-in program is widely adopted by enterprises,which changes the way to market new products and to recycle used products;furthermore,the collection platform begins to offer trade-in service,which provides a new option for the manufacturer to implement trade-ins.At last,since remanufacturing can reduce emissions,the carbon tax promotes the combination of remanufacturing and trade-in programs in practice.In the aforementioned context,based on remanufacturing and trade-in strategies this paper focuses on the characters and processing methods of used products,and studies the channel selection and pricing decisions to realize the sustainable supply chain from the following four aspects.(1)The remanufacturing and channel selection decisions of the closed-loop supply chain with online marketplaces.When used products with no remaining value is remanufactured,four channel models are established under single period setting considering that the manufacturer can market the new and the remanufactured product through the e-retailer's self-run shop and the online marketplace(direct-sale shop of the manufacturer).The optimal decisions of the manufacturer and the e-retailer are derived and the channel selection from different aspects is conducted based on numerical experiments.The results show that: the optimal channel choices of the manufacturer and the retailer are influenced by the order fulfillment cost and the platform fee,the choice of the consumer is only influenced by the order fulfillment cost,but from the perspective of environment the channel choice is not influenced by the two factors.(2)The impacts of trade-in programs on duopoly competition with secondhand markets.When used products with remaining value are collected by trade-in programs and resold in an independent secondhand market,the competition of two manufacturers whose products have different quality and two scenarios of the secondhand market(the price of used product is stable or decreasing in its supply quantity)are considered.Under this context,the models of duopoly competition under different secondhand market scenarios are established.The results show that: when the price of used products is stable,trade-in programs always benefit the implementer and consumers but hurt the opponent of the implementer;when the price is variable,the trade-in program of the high-quality manufacturer may benefit the low-quality manufacturer but hurt consumers.(3)The manufacturer's selection of trade-in partner and pricing strategy with the trade-in service offered by the collection platform.When used products with remaining valued are collected by trade-in programs and resold in the same market of new products,three supply chain models under single period setting are established considering the manufacturer has two options(the retailer and the collection platform)to implement trade-ins and two pricing strategies(uniform or differential wholesale price)for downstream partners.The results show that: the manufacturer should choose the collection platform to implement trade-ins and use differential pricing strategy;when offering the trade-in program the e-retailer does not generate profits from used product reselling while the collection platform does earn profits from reselling used products;the differential pricing strategy is beneficial to the platform;for the retailer,the differential pricing strategy is harmful when new product cost is small but can be also beneficial with the increase of the cost.(4)The manufacturing/remanufacturing decisions with carbon tax and trade-in programs.When used products with remaining value are collected by trade-in programs and remanufactured,considering carbon tax and the restriction of the cores for remanufacturing a two-period model and a single-period model are established for two market scenarios(replacement consumers exist,or not),respectively;then,the optimal decisions under each scenario are derived.The results show that: the decision regions are decided by different factors under the two market scenarios;when remanufacturing cannot reduce emissions greatly the carbon tax may force the manufacturer to give up trade-ins and remanufacturing.The conclusions obtained in this research enrich the theory and methods of sustainable supply chain management,and provide useful managerial insights for enterprises and policy makers to make wisdom decisions on remanufacturing and trade-ins.