Optimal pricing and advertising decisions with suppliers' oligopoly competition: Stakelberg-Nash game structures

Abstract

This paper addresses the coordination of pricing, advertising, and production-inventory decisions in a multi-product three-echelon supply chain composed of multiple suppliers, single manufacturer, and multiple retailers. The demand of each product is considered to be non-linearly influenced by the retail price and advertising expenditure. Taking into account the dominant power of the manufacturer and the suppliers' oligopoly competition, this paper aims at obtaining the equilibrium prices at each level of the supply chain and comparing two different scenarios of competitions and cooperation: The former focuses on the situation where the single manufacturer has the dominant power in the supply chain and acts as the leader followed by the retailers and the suppliers simultaneously. The latter implies the situation in which the dominant manufacturer enters cooperation with each independent retailer to boost sales while the suppliers play the role of the followers simultaneously. We develop the Stackelberg-Nash game (SNG), and the Stackelberg-Nash game with cooperation (SNGC) formulations to model the two market structures. The equilibrium decisions are achieved through the optimization methods and the existence and uniqueness properties are explored. Finally, analytical and computational analyses are carried out through a numerical example, and a comprehensive sensitivity analysis is conducted to discuss some managerial insights such as increasing competition among suppliers leads to reducing retail prices.