Fairness and retailer-led supply chain coordination under two different degrees of trust

Abstract

Nowadays, customers are the decisive part in the market. The retailers who are closest to final consumers in a supply chain begin to show their power and thereby dominate the supply chain. Thus, the research about a retailer-led supply chain continues to be a burning question in the recent trade press and academic literature. Our research adds fresh fuel to the fire by studying how one channel member' fairness concern affects the coordination of a two-stage supply chain with a dominant retailer and a supplier. We carry out our investigation in two cases which involve different degrees of trust between the channel members about the unit cost $c$ provided by the supplier. Our analysis shows that if the channel members have the same degree of trust on $c$-value, the dominant retailer can use a constant markup pricing contract to align the fair-minded supplier's interest with the channel's and coordinate the channel with a wholesale price higher than the supplier's marginal cost; but the coordination fails if the dominant retailer is the only one who cares about fairness, and he obtains a lower profit than nobody cares about fairness. If the dominant retailer and the supplier have different degrees of trust on $c$-value, the retailer can not coordinate the channel with a markup pricing contract when only the supplier has fairness concerns.