Channel Competition and Coordination of a Dual-Channel Supply Chain under Interval Demand

Abstract

Interval demand is becoming more common than ever before, since the variation bounds of uncertain demand are only required in practice, and they could be obtained through only a small amount of uncertain information. The goal of this paper is to analyze the optimal decision and coordination of a competitive dual-channel supply chain under an interval uncertain demand. For this purpose, we establish a centralized decision model and a wholesale price contract model under both interval demand and channel competition, respectively. Meanwhile, both the satisfaction degree of interval and the order relation of interval number are proposed to convert interval uncertain optimization problems to deterministic ones. Then, we derive the optimal pricing decisions, ordering quantities, and performances of partners and the supply chain system. Meanwhile, a revenue sharing contract is proposed to coordinate the competitive dual-channel supply chain under interval demand. Moreover, we found that the bounds of interval demand and channel sensitivities affect the optimal strategies and revenue sharing contract under interval uncertainty. Finally, we present a numerical analysis to illustrate the proposed results in this paper and conduct sensitivity analyses. The findings of this paper provide important references for decision makers and managers to make scientific decisions in an interval uncertain environment.

Did New Retail Enhance Enterprise Competition during the COVID-19 Pandemic? An Empirical Analysis of Operating Efficiency

“…Gu believes that, with increasing international trade dependence, investment and export pressure has gradually spread from abroad to China in recent years, so that the retail market of China constantly squeezed by competition from the external environment [31]. Secondly, Peng Jing and Peng and Lin pointed out that the size of demand disturbance and consumers' acceptance of electronic channels have an important impact on the optimal decision-making and coordination contract of the two-channel supply chain system [32]. Gao states that, in the "Internet+" business environment, traditional entities suffer from online retail impact due to the advantages of e-commerce in terms of price, category, region, and other aspects, transferring a large number of consumer groups from offline to online [25].…”

“…China has been one of the world's most significant online retail markets for many years [25,31,32,40,49]. However, due to the influence of the new normal reform of the economy [50,51], the segmentation of the online retail market [49], and the surge in-store operating costs [52], traditional Chinese retail enterprises suffered an unprecedented decline in business from 2010 to 2015 [53][54][55][56].…”

“…The total retail sales of the top 100 retailers in China have been declining year on year. In 2015, the growth rate was lower than 5% for the first time; in 2016, it was only 3.5% [25,32,[61][62][63][64][65][66]. At the same time, due to the dual pressure of labor costs and rising housing prices, physical stores were forced to be involved in the "bankruptcy wave collectively."…”

Platform Operations under Dual-Channel Catering Supply Chain

“…The innovation of our study is that we consider the optimal promotional effort along with the platform's optimal online discount or surcharge. Tang et al [27] investigates the decision optimization problem of a manufacturer and a retailer in the wholesale and direct selling dual channels under centralized and decentralized decision-making. Under centralized decision-making, the supply chain maximizes profits by optimizing prices in both channels.…”