Abstract
Motivated by a large amount of quality loss and quantity loss of fresh products during transportation, this paper examines the effect of the double loss on decisions and profits by establishing models for a fresh e‐commerce supply chain consisting of one online retailer and one third‐party logistics provider. The online retailer sells fresh products and provides compensation for quantity loss. TPL’s fresh‐keeping effort during transportation can effectively reduce the double loss. We find that: (i) under the centralized model, the basic quantity loss rate and freshness sensitivity can improve fresh‐keeping effort. The online retailer prefers price‐raising strategies as the basic quantity loss rate increases and freshness sensitivity decreases. But, if fresh‐keeping cost is within a certain range and the basic quantity loss rate is high enough, the online retailer prefers price reduction strategies. If fresh‐keeping cost is high, as freshness sensitivity increases, the retailer first reduces prices and then raises prices. (ii) Under the decentralized model, as the basic quantity loss rate and freshness sensitivity increase, product price will increase. (iii) Centralized decision‐making mode is more profitable to the supply chain. Furthermore, we design a “two‐way cost sharing‐revenue sharing” contract to coordinate the supply chain and achieve Pareto improvement.
Highlights
Discrete Dynamics in Nature and Society of companies; on the other hand, it affects the pricing of fresh products through the transmission mechanism and affects consumers’ purchase intention and behavior, which will affect the profit situation of the TPL and the fresh e-commerce merchants
Online retailers are willing to cooperate with a TPL provider to decrease quality loss and quantity loss
This paper first establishes two decisionmaking modes, comparatively analyzes the equilibrium decisions of the fresh-keeping effort and the retail price, and further explores how to design contracts to achieve fresh e-commerce supply chain coordination. e main conclusions are as follows: Under the centralized model, we find that the freshkeeping effort increases with the increase in the basic fresh-keeping effort retail price supply chain member profit
Summary
Based on the topic we discussed, our work is related to the following two aspects. One aspect is the study about deteriorating item supply chain; another aspect is the study about logistic outsourcing. erefore, we will summarize the literature from the above two aspects. Cai et al [34] believed that TPL’s fresh-keeping effort can increase the value of fresh products and eliminate the two “double marginal effects” in the supply chain through contracts On this basis, Wu et al [35] and Yu et al [6] considered the logistics service level of TPL to affect the quality and quantity of fresh products at the same time and studied the optimal decision-making. Yu et al [36] discussed the impact of the outsourcing model of fresh agricultural products on supply chain decisions and profits. We integrate quality loss and quantity loss into a framework for a fresh e-commerce supply chain and study the pricing and fresh-keeping effort decisions under the centralized and decentralized game models, respectively.
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