Research On The Supply Chain Pricing Of One-way Alternative Products Under Capacity Constraints

The increasing number of similar products in the market has brought new challenges to the operation of enterprises: when the similar products can be replaced in one direction,using high-end products to replace low-end products is one of the common methods for sellers to improve customer service levels and increase profits.At the same time,in many industries,manufacturing companies in the supply chain are affected by resources(such as capacity)and frequent switching of production lines,resulting in the waste of resources and rising costs.Providing similar products has gradually become an optional behavior to meet downstream demand.Under such a background,it is of theoretical and practical significance to study the production,ordering and pricing of alternative products under the constraints of manufacturers' production capacity.Firstly,based on information symmetry and one-way substitution of products considering the pricing of a manufacturer with capacity constraints and a retailer,and the market demand is stochastic perturbation.A Stackelberg single-period Game is established to decide the optimal wholesale prices and sale prices,in which the manufacturer is the leader and the retailer is the follower.Theoretical analysis indicated that the more the production capacity is,the lower the optimal price of the manufacturer and the retailer are.The probability of the substitution of products and the level of service were merely related to the distribution of the stochastic perturbation term of demand.The rationality of model was verified by numerical analysis.It was found that supply chain members and system profits increased with the degree of product substitution and production capacity.And when the manufacturer is not limited by production capacity,the decision variables and the profit levels were no longer influenced by the change of production capacity.Secondly,consider a two-stage supply chain with a manufacturer with capacity constraints and a retailer,in which the information between supplier and demand isnot completely symmetrical.A three-stage game model is established to study the supply chain decision-making problems for production,ordering,and responsive pricing of two unidirectional alternatives.Theoretical analysis obtains the manufacturer's optimal production decisions,and shows that retailers have to meet different conditions to make different ordering and pricing decisions.The results of numerical calculations are presented to verify the optimal production and ordering decisions and their conditions in the supply chain.Sensitivity analysis shows that the increase of manufacturer's production capacity,the variance of potential market demand and price sensitivity of alternatives is beneficial to improve the profit of the supply chain system and each member.While the increase of the price sensitivity coefficient of the product being substituted plays a reverse role.The pricing problem for the supply chain considers both information symmetry and information asymmetry,and integrates the manufacturer's capacity constraints and product substitutability as impact factors.In addition,this article considers the alternative between retailers and market demand,while also considering alternatives between manufacturers and retailers.