Achieve Supply Chain Coordination Research Articles

Supply Chain Coordination of New Energy Vehicles under a Novel Shareholding Strategy

As important methods of ecofriendly transportation, the supply chain coordination of new energy vehicles (NEVs) is an important issue in the field of sustainability. This study constructs a Stackelberg game composed of a power battery supplier and an NEV manufacturer. To better describe the coordination relationship in the NEV supply chain, we introduce the Nash bargaining framework into the fairness concern preference utility function. Through a comprehensive discussion of shareholding ratios and external environment factors, we discover that the traditional shareholding strategy fails to coordinate the NEV supply chain effectively, as enterprises seek to avoid losing management control, which occurs when excessive shares are held by others. In this context, this study proposes a novel industry–university–research (IUR) shareholding strategy, which can more easily achieve supply chain coordination and improve social welfare. In particular, this study reveals the superiority of the novel strategy in eliminating the double-marginal effect caused by high fairness concern preference among NEV enterprises. Based on these facts, we provide enterprises with optimal strategies under different conditions and offer a government-optimal subsidy to maximize the social welfare function.

Research on the improvement mechanism of value-based healthcare objectives in pharmaceutical group procurement

Focusing on the research scenario that integrates value-based healthcare objectives with the pharmaceutical group purchasing model, this study delineates value-based healthcare objectives in pharmaceutical group purchasing from three perspectives: drug sales price, drug quality, and service level. We construct a three-level pharmaceutical group purchasing supply chain consisting of drug manufacturers, medical institutions, and non-profit drug group purchasing organisations. Under centralised and decentralised decision-making, we introduce cost-sharing contracts and “cost-sharing-quantity-discount” contracts to analyse the impact of factors such as drug sales price, quality, and sensitivity of the service level. The study found that: (1) Compared with centralised decision-making, the optimal drug quality and service level in decentralised decision-making and the optimal profits of drug manufacturers and medical institutions will decrease. However, the optimal drug sales price in decentralised decision-making always deviates from that in centralised decision-making, leading to higher or lower drug sales prices. (2) The incorporation of value-based healthcare objectives in the pharmaceutical group purchasing through cost-sharing contracts depends on changes in the proportion of drug quality costs borne by medical institutions. If the proportion is too high, medical institutions will suffer greater losses because they bear too much of the cost. (3) Under certain conditions, cost-sharing contracts can improve supply chain efficiency but cannot achieve supply chain coordination, while the combination of “cost-sharing-quantity-discount” contracts can achieve supply chain coordination in pharmaceutical group purchasing.

Examining supply chain financing: A comparative and coordination analysis under a buyback contract

This paper focuses on financing schemes for a supply chain with high salvage values of unsold products. Combining the buyback contract with a partial credit guarantee (PCG) contract and trade credit (TC) contract, we propose two financing schemes, PCG-Buyback and TC-Buyback, to provide flexible financing services for a capital-constrained retailer and obtain equilibrium strategies of each supply chain member. Furthermore, for PCGBuyback, this paper obtains a Pareto coordination frontier consisting of the credit guarantee coefficient and the buyback price at different initial capital levels, which is more flexible to achieve supply chain coordination. Finally, we analyze the manufacturer’s strategic choices of PCG-Buyback and TC-Buyback in terms of credit guarantee coefficient, buyback price, and financing rate. Our results show that PCG-Buyback is the optimal financing scheme for the manufacturer when both the credit guarantee coefficient and buyback price (or financing rate) are low; otherwise, TC-Buyback is the dominant strategy. This study explores how the risk-sharing mechanism combination of PCG and buyback contracts can provide a more flexible approach to supply chain coordination. Additionally, it highlights the significance of the manufacturer selecting a better financing scheme based on its individual characteristics.

Operation strategies of capital-constrained small and medium-sized enterprises based on blockchain technology

Introduction: In reality, due to the low credit rating of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), it is difficult for them to obtain sufficient financing from a single financier. This paper considers a dual-channel supply chain consisting of a capital-constrained manufacturer, an e-commerce platform (ECP), a third-party logistics company (3PL) and consumers. There are two innovations in this paper: the manufacturer obtains sufficient production funds through hybrid financing of the ECP and 3PL, and consumers want to know product information and compare prices. The contributions of this paper are to investigate new applications of blockchain in both hybrid financing and meeting consumer information search needs.Methodology: We discuss the operation and pricing decisions of supply chain in two scenarios. These two scenarios are without adopting blockchain (N) and with adopting blockchain (B). Then, we compare the equilibrium decisions in two scenarios.Results: The results show that the supply chain will adopt blockchain when certain conditions are met. The initial adoption of blockchain is bad for the ECP and 3PL. Further, we find that with the increase of financing ratio, the optimal financing interest rate of the ECP decreases, while the optimal financing interest rate of the 3PL increases.Discussion: The numerical analysis shows that the adoption of blockchain can be more profitable when the cost of information search is high.Management insights: In order to achieve supply chain coordination, the manufacturer should give subsidies the ECP and 3PL.

Pricing and Coordinating the Lease-Oriented Closed-Loop Supply Chain for Construction Machinery in the Era of Carbon Tax

Promoting sustainable production and consumption practices in the construction machinery industry is crucial for achieving energy savings and reducing carbon emissions. However, there is a lack of targeted studies addressing the challenge of scaling up leasing and recycling while maximizing economic benefits for enterprises. To fill this gap, this paper presents a lease-oriented closed-loop supply chain model that incorporates a carbon tax policy to investigate the impact of the carbon tax rate and consumer preferences for remanufactured products on the supply chain and introduces a leasing compensation–cost apportioning combined contract to achieve supply chain coordination in the construction machinery sector. The model considers differential selling and leasing prices for new and remanufactured products, as well as the recovery rate, under both centralized and decentralized decision-making approaches. The study explores the interrelationships between various parameters through sensitivity analysis and numerical simulation. The results demonstrate that within a certain range of the cost apportioning proportional coefficient and leasing compensation proportional coefficient, the combined contract can lead the supply chain to achieve Pareto optimality. As the carbon tax rate increases, it was observed that the profits for all parties in the supply chain tend to decrease. However, due to the increased demand for remanufactured products, the product recovery rate improves, resulting in a reduction in total carbon emissions in the closed-loop supply chain of construction machinery. Moreover, the profits of all parties and the total supply chain profits initially decrease and then increase with an increasing preference coefficient for remanufactured products among consumers. By leveraging these factors and adopting effective strategies, such as enhancing consumer recognition of remanufactured products and optimizing pricing and cost allocation, it is indeed possible for the profits of all parties and the total profits in the supply chain to surpass the initial values, even in the face of increasing carbon tax rates. This demonstrates the potential for aligning sustainability objectives with economic benefits in the construction machinery industry.

Pricing and Coordination for the Leasing and Recycling of Construction Machinery in a Supply Chain Based on Industrial Internet Platform

Leasing and recycling are important methods for developing the low-carbon sustainability of the construction machinery industry. However, there are some dilemmas caused by the extreme limitations of product service life. There has been little research on construction machinery leasing thus far and a lack of description of its unique characteristics in previous models. Focusing on the problem of pricing and coordination, a two-stage model of a leasing closed-loop supply chain based on the practical application of an Industrial Internet platform was proposed. Under centralized and decentralized decision-making scenarios, the prices of leasing and selling, maintenance effort, and recovery rate were calculated, respectively. By using the Shapley value method to optimize the selling price, and the two-part pricing contract to calculate the compensation fee, global profits can be reasonably distributed, while the supply chain can be improved. The effects of different contracts on the improvement of supply chain profit were investigated. Additionally, the correlation among parameters was explored via sensitivity analysis and numerical simulation. The findings show that the maintenance and recycling of construction machinery can be improved by using an Industrial Internet platform while achieving supply chain coordination via contracts. The enhancement of maintenance effort can decrease remanufacturing costs, which are positively correlated with the selling price and leasing price of products, further promoting the recovery rate of used products. The findings of this paper show that manufacturers can take advantage of the Industrial Internet platform to improve recycling efficiency as well as to decrease product prices and remanufacturing costs by promoting remanufacturing technologies. On the other hand, leasers need to enhance the maintenance of construction machinery. Strengthening cooperation via contracts can jointly promote leasing and recycling in the construction machinery industry and help achieve low-carbon sustainable development.

Inventory Policies and Supply Chain Coordination under Logistics Route Disruption Risks

Predictable logistics disruptions due to scheduled lockdowns for large-scale events such as the Olympic Games may not only reduce supply chain profits, but also increase carbon emissions. To help solve these problems, an emergency transit policy to be applied to the logistics path is an effective solution. However, optimal inventory control is needed. This paper proposes an optimization model to control ordering and inventory policies for decentralized and centralized supply chains. The model considers the logistics path damping coefficient, the logistics path acceleration coefficient, and the vehicle loading capacity ratio in emergency transit. Our major findings include the following. First, supply chain profits under centralization are confirmed to be higher than under decentralization. Second, a price discount mechanism can achieve supply chain coordination. Third, the manufacturers in a centralized supply chain are more inclined to choose a logistics path with a high acceleration coefficient in order to let their cargo arrive quickly and to reduce the impact of the lead time demand fluctuations. Finally, the implications of our research results for carbon emission reductions are discussed.

Contracts for biopharmaceutical manufacturing based on production cost and capabilities

ABSTRACT Strategic collaborations are critical to the success of efforts aimed at discovering new drugs and therapies in the biopharmaceutical industry. These collaborations aim to leverage domain expertise, asymmetries in production costs and/or capabilities to improve efficiency. Despite increasing collaborations, the biopharmaceutical industry lacks a structured guideline for choosing contracts. We present contract models with effort-based formulations that capture the key characteristics of biopharmaceutical operations and analyse incentive mechanisms such as fixed payment, revenue-sharing, risk-sharing, and cost-sharing in biopharmaceutical collaborations. We show that traditional incentive schemes do not achieve supply chain coordination, although they are commonly used in the industry. We introduce a new contract model called fee-for-effort-and-output contract that encourages the parties to exert higher efforts by offering discounts on their operating costs, and show that this contract achieves coordination with an appropriate selection of contract parameters. We also investigate the efficiency of noncoordinating contracts with traditional incentive schemes and identify the capability and cost structures under which they achieve the highest efficiency possible, to both determine the next-best alternatives and explain their popularity in practice.

Collaborative Innovation Strategy of Supply Chain in the Context of MCU Domestic Substitution : A Differential Game Analysis

The domestic substitution of the IC (the Integrated Circuit) industry improves economic efficiency and is significant in ensuring national security, which has gradually become an essential strategy for countries worldwide. Based on the background of domestic substitution of integrated circuits, we select a typical component Micro Controller Unit) as the research object, construct a three-level supply chain game model under different scenarios in a dynamic architecture, and analyze the game problem of collaborative innovation of the MCU supply chain. We fully consider the impact of factors such as time, cost and the innovation and collaborative innovation efforts of various supply chain members on the level of domestic substitution. Moreover, we put forward a two-part pricing + cost-sharing contract to achieve supply chain coordination. We found that: (1) Collaborative innovation of the supply chain in the centralized decision-making scenario achieves the highest level, followed by the cost-sharing scenario; (2) The two-part pricing + cost-sharing contract can help achieve supply chain coordination; (3) The trend of the MCU domestic substitution level with manufacturing cost is U-shaped, which means the increase of manufacturing cost may have a positive impact on the process of domestic substitution.

Research on Contract Coordination Mechanism of Contract Farming Considering the Green Innovation Level

Green agriculture is an important issue in agricultural development. The farming cooperative frequently chooses to improve its green innovation level of agricultural products to support the growth of green agriculture. Based on the characteristics of contract farming, this paper establishes a decision-making objective function for agricultural cooperatives considering the level of green innovation and uses the Stackelberg game method to analyze the decision-making behavior of contract farming supply chain participants. The research found that the green innovation level of the cooperative increased with the increase in yield per mu, and that the optimal contract price and planting area increased with the expansion of the market size. In particular, the planting area and green innovation level under the decentralized decision-making situation were lower than those under the centralized decision-making situation. Therefore, to better achieve supply chain coordination and improve the green innovation level, this paper proposes a “Cost sharing + Alliance expense” contract coordination mechanism. Numerical analysis shows that the contract coordination mechanism can effectively improve the green innovation level and realize the Pareto improvement in the profits of the cooperative and the enterprise.

Collaborative adoption of blockchain technology: A supply chain contract perspective

The outbreak of COVID-19 has significantly affected the development of enterprises. In the post-pandemic era, blockchain technology has become one of the important technologies to help enterprises quickly gain market competitiveness. The heavy investment required of supply chain stakeholders to employ blockchain technology has hindered its adoption and application. To tackle this issue, this study aims to facilitate the adoption of blockchain technology in a supply chain consisting of a core enterprise and a small/medium-sized enterprise through an effective supply chain contract. We analyze the performance of a cost-sharing (CS) contract and a revenue-sharing (RS) contract and propose a new hybrid CS-RS contract for better performance. We conduct comparative analyses of the three contracts and find that the hybrid CS-RS contract can more effectively incentivize both parties to reach the highest level of blockchain technology adoption and achieve supply chain coordination.

Pricing and coordination of automotive supply chain for incorporating efficient charging facilities

This paper constructs a new energy vehicle and traditional vehicle supply chain model composed of a vehicle manufacturer and an automobile retailer, compares the pricing, demand and supply chain profit of the two types of vehicles under decentralized decision-making and centralized decision-making, and then designs a revenue sharing + ex-factory price negotiation contract mechanism to coordinate the supply chain under certain conditions. The results show that: when the contract parameters meet certain conditions, the combination contract can achieve supply chain coordination and improve the profit of each member. In addition, we further study the impact of the perfection of charging facilities on the pricing, demand and supply chain profit of the two types of vehicles.

Coordination and Optimization of Supply Chain Considering the Double Fresh-keeping Effort of Supplier and 3PL

This paper takes a three-echelon supply chain consisting of a domestic supplier, an overseas retailer, and an overseas warehouse as the research object, and studies the decision-making and coordination problems of a single-channel three-echelon supply chain dominated by a cross-border e-commerce platform based on the dual preservation effort level of the supplier and the overseas warehouse, and also analyzes and compares the optimal decisions and profits of each member of the supply chain under the decentralized decision-making model and the centralized decision-making model. After exploring the infeasibility of wholesale price contract and wholesale price + cost-sharing contract, a wholesale price + cost sharing + revenue sharing hybrid contract is designed to optimize the coordination of the supply chain and finally examined and verified through arithmetic analysis. It is found that it is difficult to judge the overall utility of consumers under centralized decision-making, and the decisions made under decentralized decision-making are not optimal. Under the decentralized decision-making model, the wholesale price contract, and the wholesale price + cost-sharing contract can achieve supply chain coordination, but the contract will not be accepted because the former hurts the members' interests, and the latter reduces the overall profit. Therefore, a hybrid "wholesale price + cost sharing + revenue sharing" contract is designed to introduce profit redistribution and is shown to achieve perfect supply chain coordination.

Selection Strategy and Coordination of Green Product R&D in Sustainable Competitive Supply Chain

Green product R&D is a necessary measure for enterprises to achieve sustainable development. This paper studies the optimal selection strategy of green product R&D and the impact of price competition and green R&D cost on prices, green levels, and enterprise profits in the sustainable competitive supply chain. We establish manufacturer-led game models and compare the equilibrium results of green R&D strategies. The study found that three types of green product R&D strategies exist in competitive supply chains: neither conduct green product R&D (NN), only one supply chain conducts green product R&D (YN), and both conduct green product R&D (YY). Price competition intensity and green R&D cost have a negative impact on prices, green levels, and enterprise profits. Wholesale prices, retail prices, green levels, and enterprise profits are highest in YY strategy, but they are lowest in NN strategy. When one supply chain does not conduct green product R&D, the other supply chain will choose green product R&D only if the green R&D cost meets certain condition. When one supply chain conducts green product R&D, the optimal choice for the other supply chain is always to conduct green product R&D. For the optimal selection strategies, applying two-part pricing contracts achieve supply chain coordination. Our research results provide a reference for the strategic choice of green product R&D in competitive supply chains.

Nonlinear Differential Equations in Cross-border E-commerce Controlling Return Rate

Abstract This article constructs a nonlinear differential equation model that incorporates non-defective return factors and minimizes the expected cost of the inventory control problem under the cross-border e-commerce overseas warehouse model. Under the dynamic background, the problem of pricing and shop assistant decision-making in the supply chain is studied, and the differential game model is constructed. We use differential game theory to give pricing and store assistance strategies under decentralized and centralized decision-making. At the same time, we designed a contract to achieve supply chain coordination in this context. Numerical examples calculate the optimal return price and optimal order quantity under supply chain coordination.

Production and procurement plans via option contract with random yield and demand information updating

We investigate the production and procurement plans in a two-echelon supply chain consisting of a supplier with random yield and a retailer with stochastic demand. As the production lead time is long, the retailer would purchase options from the supplier to reserve products in advance, and then exercises options or adopts instant order to respond to market changes when demand information is updated. To provide timely order fulfilment, the supplier adopts regular and emergency production policies before and after demand information updating, respectively. We analyze the supply chain coordination problem for two cases: perfect and imperfect market signal. Our study show that a pure option contract only can coordinate supply chain with perfect market signal. For the case of imperfect market signal, we introduce a novel option contract with buyback mechanism to achieve supply chain coordination. Although conventional wisdom shows that such a responsive procurement plan with demand information updating only benefits the retailer while always hurts the supplier, we obtain a different conclusion by demonstrating that the supplier’s performance is improved by demand information updating in the presence of random yield. The intuition is that in face of random yield and demand information updating, the supplier would act conservatively to shed part of the overproduction risk by regular production, and then avoid underproduction risk by emergency production. This reactive production plan with random yield and demand information updating is new and only becomes dominant in some certain conditions. Numerical examples are presented to illustrate theoretical results.

Agricultural Supply Chain Coordination under Weather-Related Uncertain Yield

In the context of agriculture, we focus in this paper on a two-echelon supply chain consisting of a supplier facing weather-related yield uncertainty and a retailer facing market-linked demand uncertainty. We mainly investigated how the randomness of yield and demand influences the profit of the supply chain members and the performance of the entire supply chain. We adopted an additive random yield model to capture the effect of uncontrollable weather factors on crop yield. For the case where a wholesale price contract fails to achieve coordination, we propose a revenue-sharing contract with a new structural arrangement and explore its influence on the contract coordination ability. In the revised contract, the retailer purchases all the actual output from the supplier instead of an order quantity; thus, the retailer shares yield risk with the supplier. To look at the implications in detail, we conducted a numerical analysis where the uncertain yield of maize crops originates from the fluctuating rainfall; the results indicate that the revised revenue-sharing contract can achieve supply chain coordination, and all the members improve their profit. This paper shows that by redesigning the contract structure, the classical revenue-sharing contract still has the coordinating ability in the presence of simultaneous yield and demand uncertainties.

Coordination of a supply chain with Nash bargaining fairness concerns

This study incorporates fairness concerns in a dual-channel supply chain where a single manufacturer sells its product to consumers through a single retailer. The objective is to investigate the implication of fairness in conjunction with channel coordination and contracting mechanisms. To this end, we develop a game-theoretic utility model where the Nash bargaining fairness reference is leveraged to capture the impact of fairness preference on three widely used contracting mechanisms—wholesale price, buy-back, and revenue-sharing. First, we derive the optimal order quantity for both centralized and decentralized channels, and show that channel coordination is easier than that under a conventional channel when the retailer is more concerned about fairness, and his bargaining power is not strong. Second, for buy-back and revenue-sharing contracts, we acquire the equilibrium wholesale price to achieve supply chain coordination. Our analysis shows that the implication of fairness-concerns of channel members can enhance the whole supply chain performance to some extent, especially, when the manufacturer is more concerned about fairness and the bargaining power is sufficiently strong, or the retailer is more concerned with fairness and the bargaining power is relatively weak. Finally, numerical studies are conducted to quantify the impact of the fairness concerns and retailer’s bargaining power on the coordination performance, the equilibrium wholesale price, and the channel efficiency. Some useful managerial insights are provided. For example, when the buy-back and revenue-sharing coordination contracts are employed, the fairness concerns could improve the channel performance under certain conditions.

A Game-Theoretic Approach for CSR Emergency Medical Supply Chain during COVID-19 Crisis

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused high fluctuations in the demand for medical supplies. Therefore, emergency medical supplies enterprises have faced challenges in decision making and need to consider more corporate social responsibility (CSR) in production. At the same time, the government needs to take considerable measures to support emergency medical supplies enterprises. As such, our paper researches the decision and coordination problems for emergency medical supply chain considering CSR with the government, manufacturer, and retailer. The manufacturer produces emergency medical supplies. It has additional production technological innovation efforts to improve supply efficiency and assume CSR. The retailer faces uncertain demands and is responsible for undertaking CSR to meet the demands. The government must implement a certain degree of subsidies to ease the impact of the pandemic on emergency medical supply chain enterprises. Meanwhile, our paper further explores the obligations of the economy, society, and efficiency of enterprises under the COVID-19 pandemic and the decision making of enterprises for the implementation of CSR. Based on the principle of maximizing social welfare, we discuss decentralized decision making (without government and with government) and centralized decision making, respectively. On this basis, our paper not only designs a wholesale price–cost sharing joint contract coordination mechanism but also proves that a joint contract can achieve supply chain coordination under certain conditions. Through the analysis, we observe: (1) Government subsidies can improve the enthusiasm of supply chain members to undertake CSR; (2) With the improvement of the retailer’s CSR level, the profits of supply chain members and overall performance have improved to a certain degree; (3) To improve supply efficiency and assume social responsibility, the manufacturer implements technological innovation investment. However, it will impose some burden on the manufacturer. Government subsidies allow the manufacturer to balance between social responsibility and its profit.

Joint emission reduction dynamic optimization and coordination in the supply chain considering fairness concern and reference low-carbon effect

<p style='text-indent:20px;'>In the context of low-carbon economy, in order to explore the impact of the fairness concern and reference low-carbon effect on supply chain members' balanced emission reduction decisions and profits, supply chain joint emission reduction dynamic optimization models under four different scenarios are built, in which the manufacturer's optimal emission reduction strategy, the retailer's optimal low-carbon promotion strategy and other equilibrium solutions are solved by differential game theory. On the basis of analysis, a contract is designed to achieve the coordination of the supply chain when members are fairness concern. Some findings are as follows. First, when consumers' purchasing behavior is significantly affected by the reference low-carbon effect, and they have higher expectations for the product's emission reduction level, consumers' reference low-carbon effect will discourage the manufacturer's enthusiasm to reduce emissions, and do harm to the profits of the manufacturer and the retailer. Second, the fairness concern behavior of both parties will aggravate the adverse effects of reference low-carbon effect, bring a detrimental effect on the performance of the supply chain, aggravate the double marginal effect of the supply chain, and cause continuous negative social influence. Third, the bilateral cost-sharing contract can encourage the manufacturer to increase emission reduction investment, the retailer to increase low-carbon promotion investment, and can achieve a Pareto improvement of both parties' profits and utilities. In addition, the two cost-sharing ratios are only proportional to the marginal revenue and fairness concern intensity of both parties. Finally, when the two cost-sharing ratios and the revenue-sharing coefficient meet a certain relationship and are within a reasonable range, the bilateral cost sharing-revenue sharing hybrid contract can reduce the double marginal effect and achieve supply chain coordination.</p>