| Product innovation is an important means for enterprises to win competitive advantages and increase profits.However,the rapid launch of new products accelerates the change of products and increases the abandonment rate of old products,thus creating a greater burden on the environment.Therefore,in order to cope with the increasing amount of waste caused by the elimination of old products due to the introduction of new products,more and more governments hope to revise recycling policies,implement stricter recycling targets,and encourage enterprises to remanufacture to increase the environmental performance.For policy makers,the ultimate goal is to promote the remanufacturing of old products through recycling policies,thereby improving environmental performance.However,for enterprises,the achievement of the above goals may have an impact on their own operational decisions.Especially,compared to the production of new products,remanufacturing,although accompanied by lower production costs,can erode the market share of new products,thereby affecting the profitability.It should be noted that although there is literature on how recycling policies or product innovation affect remanufacturing decisions,there is little literature that considers all three in a unified manner.On the one hand,literature that considers the impact of product innovation on remanufacturing decisions in a competitive context ignores the fact that the abandonment of old products is driven by the introduction of new products.On the other hand,some literature,even though discussing product innovation and recycling strategies in the context of competition,rarely involves in the remanufacturing activities of enterprises,so their research conclusions cannot be extended to the field of remanufacturing.Thus,this article establishes a two-period supply chain model to explore factors such as product innovation,recycling goals,and remanufacturing in the context of duopoly and multi oligopoly competition.That is,from the perspectives of duopoly and duopoly competition,based on the policy background of product recycling,the optimal decisions of product innovation and remanufacturing strategies for original equipment manufacturers(OEMs)in the presence of both product substitution and multiagent competition were examined:Firstly,in the duopoly model,the problem of characterizing market competition by the degree of mutual substitution of products between enterprises was discussed.Thesis constructs a two-period model of product innovation,recycling goals,and remanufacturing,and obtains the Nash equilibrium solution through reverse induction methods.Based on the competitive feature of mutual substitution of products in duopoly enterprises,by comparing the optimal decision equilibrium between remanufacturing and non-remanufacturing scenarios,the strategic choices for remanufacturing and product innovation of original equipment manufacturers under different conditions can be obtained.Thesis found that remanufacturing not only reduces a company’s motivation for new product innovation,but also reduces the degree of reduction as competition intensifies.Secondly,the study found that when the costs associated with remanufacturing are low,the profit of original equipment manufacturers in the remanufacturing scenario is higher,otherwise the conclusion is the opposite.Therefore,this article suggests that in order to promote environmental performance,policy makers should not only set recycling targets for waste products for enterprises,but also add additional remanufacturing targets.Of course,the adjustment of this policy must take into account the intensity of market competition,as with the increase in market competition intensity(i.e.,the increase in product substitution rate),enterprises are less willing to reduce their new product sales.Secondly,extended to the situation of oligopoly competition,that is,based on the consideration of product substitution in the previous chapter,thesis will consider the competition problem from the two perspectives of product substitution and multi-agent coexistence,so as to make the research more suitable for the perfect competition market,and then discuss the influence of the increase in the number of firms on the recycling strategy,product innovation and remanufacturing decisions.The results indicate that in the context of oligopoly competition,the main conclusion of this article is still valid:remanufacturing will reduce the motivation of enterprises for new product innovation.Moreover,the more firms there are,the less their decisions are influenced by other firms’ behaviors.Finally,thesis further uses the empirical research method to conduct supplementary analysis of the proposition that remanufacturing will reduce product innovation incentives.In thesis,S&P500 enterprises were selected as samples,and remanufacturing data of enterprises were collected and collated.The R&D investment intensity and control variables were derived from the Compustat database of WRDS,and the data were mixed panel data from 2009 to 2018 Then,thesis conducts a regression analysis on the interactions between remanufacturing and R&D investment intensity,and the regression results show that remanufacturing has a significant negative correlation with R&D investment,which indicates that the conclusions of the model fit the actual operation of enterprises.Subsequently,the robustness of the conclusion is proved by robustness test,and the empirical significance of the mathematical model is well tested. |
