A systematic literature review and bibliometric analysis based on pricing related decisions in remanufacturing

Abstract

The popularity of remanufacturing among the research community resulted in an increase in the number of academic publications in recent years. Quite a number of literature reviews related to reverse logistics, core acquisition management, Design for Remanufacturing (DfRem), production planning, analytical models in remanufacturing were published in various journals. The management of remanufactured products is quite complex due to specific operations like core acquisition, reverse logistics, disassembly, cleaning, repairing and reassembly. This often makes determining the price of remanufactured product a difficult task. Moreover, pricing of remanufactured products acts as a control mechanism to maintain the demand for both new and remanufactured products. A significant number of academic publications have been published regarding pricing and competition decision in remanufacturing. This paper aims to study with a focus on pricing related decisions in remanufacturing through bibliometric analysis that can provide insights into the latest research trends in this area by analysing the most significant and cited papers, authors collaboration network, keywords, countries, and institutions. In this paper, a thorough review and bibliometric analysis are conducted over 336 articles from 2000 until May 2020. The systematic mapping and analysis help to identify developing research areas, key research topics, publication evolution over time, collaboration patterns among authors, countries, the co-occurrence of authors keywords, and future research directions. From the content analysis, we have identified five pricing models such as pricing of remanufactured products under competition, impact of the product lifecycle on remanufacturing pricing, pricing related to product design in remanufacturing, pricing models under an uncertain environment, and optimal pricing under customer willingness-to-pay. We have also identified the decision variables, assumptions, and research objective(s) for each model. The findings of this research provide a direction for a further study in this domain, such as how pricing of a remanufactured products can be done in oligopolistic competition, how an effective product design strategy determines the price of remanufactured product, how the government regulatory policies influence the profitability in remanufacturing, or what is the effect of carbon cap and trade mechanism on the price of remanufactured products.