Dual-channel environmental hotel supply chain network equilibrium decision under altruism preference and demand uncertainty

Abstract

To study the influence of the altruistic preference of decision makers and the low-carbon preference of consumers on decision-making behaviour in all layers of a dual-channel environmental hotel supply chain, this paper constructs a dual-channel supply chain network equilibrium model comprising hotels, online travel agent(OTA) platforms and demand markets. Under the condition of uncertain demand from the merchant and agency mode perspectives, variational inequalities are used to describe the altruistic preference of each layer of agents and their mutual influence and the low-carbon preference of consumers. Then the equilibrium conditions of the system are obtained and the optimal decision-making results are obtained by using the improved projection gradient algorithm. Finally, the effectiveness of the model is verified through a numerical case analysis. It is found that the increase effort in carbon emission reduction has a significant impact on the profits of hotels and online travel agency platforms. The altruistic preferences of decision makers have different impacts on the supply chain under the merchant mode and the agency mode. When the altruistic preference for the OTA platform increases, the OTA platform model is more profitable than the merchant model. The deeper the degree of hotel altruism preference is, the greater the intra-hotel cooperation, which may lead to the rise of an Environmental Tourism Products and Service(ETP&S) volume in the direct selling market of hotels and make the profit of the OTA platform decrease slightly; however, the profit under the OTA platform is still higher than that under the merchant mode.