Investigating a green supply chain with product recycling under retailer's fairness behavior

Abstract

<p style='text-indent:20px;'>Due to the rapid increment of environmental pollution and advancement of society, recently many manufacturing firms have started greening their products and focusing on product remanufacturing. The retailing firms are also taking several efforts for marketing those products and thinking more about the fairness of the business. Keeping this in mind, this study investigates the effect of recycling activity and the retailer's fairness behavior on pricing, green improvement, and marketing effort in a closed-loop green supply chain. In the forward channel, the manufacturer sells the green product through the retailer while in the reverse channel, either the manufacturer or the retailer or an independent third-party collects used products. The centralized model and six decentralized models are developed depending on the retailer's fairness behavior and/or product recycling. The optimal results are derived and compared analytically. The analytical results are verified by exemplifying a numerical example. A restitution-based wholesale price contract is developed to resolve the channel conflicts and coordinate the supply chain. Our results reveal that (ⅰ) the manufacturer never selects the third-party as a collector of used products under fair-neutral retailer, (ⅱ) the fairness behavior of the retailer improves her profitability but it diminishes the manufacturer's profit, and (ⅲ) if the manufacturer does not pay much transfer price, then the collection through the third-party is preferable to the fair-minded retailer.</p>