Managing a Dual-Channel Supply Chain with Fairness and Channel Preference

Xianjin Du,Weijie Zhao,Fateh Mebarek-Oudina

doi:10.1155/2021/6614692

Xianjin Du, Weijie Zhao + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1155/2021/6614692

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Abstract

This paper investigates a dual-channel supply chain in which a manufacturer sells the product via an offline retailer or online store. The manufacturer sets the wholesale and online price, and the retailer decides the retail price with the retailer’s fairness preference and consumer’s online channel preference. Through investigating the combined impacts of fairness preference and channel preference on the enterprises’ operational strategies, this paper obtains some meaningful results. If a manufacturer thinks over the fairness preference, he decreases the wholesale price to mitigate a loss of retailer and benefit the supply chain design. The manufacturer intends to set up the online channel with a lower acceptance as the fairness preference grows. However, the gains from enhanced online channel acceptance cannot compensate for the manufacturer’s loss by the fairness effect that benefits the retailer. Moreover, the manufacturer cannot neglect the retailer’s fairness preference generating a “lose-lose” case for both members.

Highlights

With the increasing innovation of information technology and vigorous publicity by commercial organizations, consumers are getting used to online shopping
To seize the Internet opportunity, many enterprises have set up the supply chain composed of online and offline channels such as Apple, Nike, Zara, and Huawei, and many scholars study dual-channel supply chain under different cases
A few papers focus on how the consumer’s online channel preference impacts the dualchannel strategy (Chiang et al [1], Xu et al [2], and Zhang et al [3]), while others try to find the operational strategy for the dual-channel supply chain (Guo et al [4] and Zhu et al [5]). ere is a lot of research (Chen et al [6], Cui et al [7], Guan et al [8], Niu et al [9], and Pan et al [10]) studying the impact of fairness preference in the supply chain, especially the supply chain design decisions and coordination

Summary

Introduction

With the increasing innovation of information technology and vigorous publicity by commercial organizations, consumers are getting used to online shopping. E paper studies the synergistic impact of consumer online channel acceptance and retailer’s fairness preference on members’ pricing decisions and profits. Different from other literatures that independently examine the influence of supply chain enterprises’ decisions from the perspective of consumer’s online channel preference or retailers’ fairness, this paper obtains some meaningful conclusions as follows: (i) If a manufacturer thinks over the fairness preference, he decreases his wholesale price to mitigate a loss of retailer. Our paper first studies the combining effect of both consumer’s online channel preference differences and the retailer’s fairness preference on supply chain decisions. Our research allows decisionmakers to use these factors to reach supply chain efficiency improvement and provide guidance for the enterprises

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