Optimal Pricing And Service Decision-Making In A Fresh Agricultural Products Dual-Channel Supply Chain Considering The Delivery Time

Fresh agricultural products are closely related to people's daily lives.Accompanied by an increase in personal income,the daily consumption of fresh agricultural products has been on the rise as well.Meanwhile,customers have raised a higher requirement for the quality of the food products.With the rise of big data and the Internet,customers are able to make a purchase through various acquisition channels.Customers can either purchase offline from physical retailers or order online,filling their shopping carts with multiple kinds of fresh agricultural products.It is so fast and convenient to make a purchase online that customers can obtain the products needed just with a click to send the order.This new way of consumption has encouraged more and more fresh food enterprises to open online selling channels so as to attract more potential customers.The enterprises determine their policies on delivery service partially based on their customers' requirements for delivery time.Therefore,this research sets out to explore the influences of delivery time on consumers' buying decision and enterprises' delivery cost,and then continues to tackle the question of how to maximize the pricing policies.Specifically speaking,the research content is divided into the following two parts,detailed as follows.Firstly,the dual-channel pricing decision considering delivery time made by fresh retailer is researched.Based on the situation in which consumers are sensitive to the delivery time when purchasing fresh agricultural products through online channels,this thesis analyzes whether retailers should develop online channels to supply a dual-channel retailing service.Then it analyzes the optimal pricing and delivery time decisions under the decentralized mode and centralized mode,and presents that reward and punishment contract can realize the supply chain coordination.Then this research comparatively analyzes the consumer surplus under the three modes,and concludes that the dual-channel structure under the centralized decision-making mode is more effective in improving consumer surplus.Finally,this thesis studies the effect of key parameters on the optimal decisions and profits gained by the retailer and third-party logistics.Secondly,the study on the pricing decisions in service competition of fresh agricultural products dual channels are carried out.Under the mode of dual-channel which combines offline selling with online service,there exists competition between offline retailer and online vendor.In the competitive atmosphere,whether the retailer needs to provide value-added service is under discussion in this research.Then optimal pricing decisions made by the retailer and vendor under the decentralized mode and the centralized mode are analyzed in comparison.Furthermore,it is also pointed out that the implementation of the reward and punishment contract realize the supply chain coordination under the decentralized mode.Followed by a contrastive analysis on the customer surplus under the three modes,this research finally examines how key parameters exert influences on the vendor's and the retailer's making optimal decisions and profits.