Optimal Dual Channel Design And Coordination In An E-commerce Environment

With the rapid development of the Internet and the logistics industry,the mode of operation and management of society has been changed.A large number of traditional enterprises began to follow the pace of the times to explore the internet-based direct channel,which on the one hand extend the market shares,on the other hand also cause a tremendous negative impact on traditional channels.Opportunities and challenges coexist,so that how to seize this opportunity to survive in such a competitive social environment,and obtain the maximize profit of their own and the entire supply chain has attracted a common concern in real businesses and academic.This paper summarized the domestic and foreign research status,which involve the channel selection and pricing strategy,channel conflict and coordination,and the strategy in production cost disruption with asymmetric information.Questions about whether the manufacturer or the retailer is more suitable to open the direct channel,and how to realize the own maximize profit under the Stackalberg game model were analyzed.Meanwhile,we offered a retailer's contract strategy when the small manufacturers' production cost changed suddenly,so as to encourage manufacturers to better coordinate with retailers,and to get higher interests of the whole supply chain.The specific research contents and conclusions are as followed.(1)In order to identify whether the manufacturer or the retailer is more suitable to open the direct channel,four different channel models were established and analyzed,which included the single traditional retailer channel model,dual channel model of manufacturer,dual-channel model of retailer with consistent and inconsistent pricing strategy.And the whole channel members' profits and the total supply chain's profit were compared.At the same time,the optimal market strategies of the manufacturer and the retailer in the dual-channel model of retailer has been studied,and a revenue sharing contract — the manufacturer provides products to retailer in a low price,in return,the retailer shares part of profit to the manufacturer — as an additional strategic tool for full channel coordination has been designed.The research indicates that this revenue sharing contract can fully coordinate all the distribution channels,so that the profit of each member in supply chain increases.(2)The optimal contract design problem in a dual-channel model of retailer composed of one manufacturer and one retailer was investigated,in which the retailer plays the dominated role in the supply chain.The optimal contract in three different situations were studied through the theory of consumer choice and the principal-agent,including no production cost disruption,production cost disruption under the symmetric information and production cost disruption under the asymmetric information.Moreover,the impact of asymmetric production cost disruption information on the performance of the whole supply chain was analyzed.It is suggested that the original supply chain strategy has robustness,which means that the original production plan is still suitable when the value of production cost disrupts in a certain range,and vice versa.In addition,the information privacy of production cost disruption would lower the profits of the retailer,but it is not an inevitable event to decrease the profits of the entire supply chain.