Push or Pull? Perishable Products with Freshness-Keeping Effort

Abstract

With the gradual improvement of living standards, people’s consumption levels and habits are changing. One notable fact is that the demand for fresh products is growing steadily. Accordingly, fresh-product preservation and logistics distribution also require higher standards. Based on the practice of fresh domestic transport and preservation, for which the producer and the distributor are responsible, this paper discusses their optimal decisions taking into account the freshness-keeping effort of the distributor. Our main contributions include the derivations of the optimal decisions of the order quantity and the freshness-keeping effort in both the pull and push models, which are common in practice but have not been studied in the literature. Our analytical models lead to the result that, all other settings being the same, the distributor always puts a greater effort into preserving the product quality in the pull model than in the push model. This phenomenon results in a greater distributor’s order quantity and producer’s shipping quantity in the pull model. We also conduct a comprehensive numerical comparison of the effects of different modulating factors, including the price and the proportion and variation of surviving quantity, in these two settings. We find that the profits of the participants and the supply chain are always larger in the pull model, which indicates that the pull model is a better choice for the supply chain.