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This paper developed an acquisition management problem in a Closed-Loop Supply chain (CLSC) network. This study determines optimal selling prices of brand-new and remanufactured products, wholesale prices, and acquisition prices in various distribution and collection channel structures. It shows that determining the best structure is highly affected by the model’s parameters, as well as the decision-makers’ objectives. Moreover, precious managerial insights from five different viewpoints have been provided for decision-makers in order to benefit considerably from various situations of remanufacturing and acquisition activities, as well as manufacturing and distribution activities. Simulation approach is employed for analyzing the proposed solutions in different conditions.

A B S T R A C TThis paper integrates competitive pricing and network design problems for the short life cycle products. The pricing problem determines selling prices of the products for different life cycle phases in a competitive market, as well as acquisition management of returned products. Besides, the selling and acquisition prices are related to the distance between distribution centers and customers. The network design problem aims to determine network flow and fleet assignment in each route. The proposed model is solved by various methods including exact and meta-heuristic approaches. The model and solving approaches have been validated and verified by several simulated examples and sensitivity analyses. Considering life cycle phases, competitive pricing, and transshipment problems as an integrated model, provides a new approach for the optimum solutions, which makes it more practical for application of real cases of short life cycle products. The results showed how the competition and fleet assignment influenced the optimum solution.

Nowadays, due to the rapid pace of technology enhancement, growing consumer expectations, and market competitiveness, life cycle of products is shortening faster than it used to be. In such situations, where new generations of products lead to the obsolescence of those currently available, the simultaneous pricing of both newly developed and available products is a challenging task. In this paper, using game theory approaches, we investigate various possible conditions in which two firms may introduce new generations of products with short life cycles. Optimum price of newly developed and planned obsolescence products are determined by the proposed method. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified using various numerical calculations and sensitivity analyses. A real case study from textile industry illustrates the application of the proposed approach in industry.