Study On Operational Decisions Of Retailers Considering Strategic Consumers And Dual-Channel Structure

The progress of technology,especially the rapid development and popularization of e-commerce,not only shapes the buying behavior of consumers,but also widens the marketing channels of the manufacturers.Consumers can get diversified product information through online shopping mall and mobile terminals.Therefore,their purchase decisions are more rational,which brings new challenges to retailers’ pricing and ordering decisions.Manufacturers can easily establish online sales channels,selling directly to end consumers.Due to manufacturer encroachment,not only there exists vertical game interactions between the manufacturer and the incumbent retailer but also the horizontal competition arises between the manufacturer’s direct channel and the retailer’s traditional channel.In view of these,this dissertation focuses on retailers’ pricing and ordering decisions when consumers are strategic,retailer’s pricing decisions in the sharing economy,and information sharing decisions of retailers when considering production cost or competition type in dual channel context.The research of this dissertation extends the research scope of retailer’s pricing and demand information sharing decisions.The research results have important theoretical guiding significance for retailer pricing and demand information sharing.The main contents of this dissertation are as follows:Firstly,we analyze the retailer’s advance selling and pricing decisions based on the newsvendor model when consumers are strategic.We find that when the ratio of high valuation consumers in the total population is high,the retailer should advance sell;otherwise,the retailer should not.After that,we model the retailer’s ordering decisions when the manufacturer’s capacity is random.We show that direct ordering strategy cannot satisfy the retailer’s need,but sharing some information about the consumers’ demand with manufacturer can satisfy the retailer’s order requirements.Secondly,we investigate retailer’s pricing decisions under the background of consumer goods sharing.We give the threshold conditions for consumers to purchase products and the pricing decisions of the retailer under the traditional circumstances.We then examine the sharer’s and user’s usage decision respectively in the context of consumer goods sharing.After that,we analyze the impact of consumer goods sharing on consumers’ purchase decision,usage decision and retailer’s pricing decisions.Thirdly,we consider a supply chain consisting of a manufacturer and a retailer.We extend the investigation of information sharing to the context where the manufacturer may have encroachment capability and may face production diseconomy or economy.We find that,in the dual-channel context,when not considering the manufacturer’s production cost,manufacturer encroachment encourages the retailer to share demand information with manufacturer and improves the supply chain performance.When the manufacturer encroaches and faces production diseconomy,information sharing benefits the retailer and it benefits the manufacturer and the supply chain on condition that production diseconomy is relatively small.When the manufacturer encroaches and faces production economy,information sharing hurts the retailer.And it benefits the manufacturer and the supply chain if the production economy is relatively small.Finally,we examine the impact of competition type on the retailer’s demand information sharing decisions.When the manufacturer encroaches,the manufacturer and the retailer may compete in quantity or in price.We find that in both quantity and price competition,the manufacturer can encourage the retailer to share demand information through side payment,leading to Pareto improvement for both retailer and manufacturer.Furthermore,we examine the impact of product substitution on supply chain performance when the retailer shares demand information.