The Impact of Product Lifecycle on Capacity Planning of Closed‐Loop Supply Chains with Remanufacturing

Product recovery operations in reverse supply chains face rapidly changing demand due to the increasing number of product offerings with reduced lifecycles. Therefore, capacity planning becomes a strategic issue of major importance for the profitability of closed‐loop supply chains. This work studies a closed‐loop supply chain with remanufacturing and presents dynamic capacity planning policies developed through the methodology of System Dynamics. The key issue of the paper is how the lifecycles and return patterns of various products affect the optimal policies regarding expansion and contraction of collection and remanufacturing capacities. The model can be used to identify effective policies, to conduct various “what‐if” analyses, and to answer questions about the long‐term profitability of reverse supply chains with remanufacturing. The results of numerical examples with quite different lifecycle and return patterns show how the optimal collection expansion/contraction and remanufacturing contraction policies depend on the lifecycle type and the average usage time of the product, while the remanufacturing capacity expansion policy is not significantly affected by these factors. The results also show that the collection and remanufacturing capacity policies are insensitive to the total product demand. The insensitivity of the optimal policies to total demand is a particularly appealing feature of the proposed model, given the difficulty in obtaining accurate demand forecasts.     

Optimal Acquisition and Sorting Policies for Remanufacturing

The condition of the used items acquired by remanufacturers is often highly variable, and sorting is an important aspect of remanufacturing operations. Sorting policies—the rules specifying which used products should be remanufactured and which should be scrapped—have received limited attention in the literature. In this paper, we examine the case of a remanufacturer who acquires unsorted used products as needed from third party brokers. As more used items are acquired for a given demand, the remanufacturer can be more selective when sorting. Thus, two related decisions are made: how many used items to acquire, and how selective to be during the sorting process. We derive optimal acquisition and sorting policies in the presence of used product condition variability for a remanufacturer facing both deterministic and uncertain demand. We show the existence of a single optimal acquisition and sorting policy with a simple structure and show that this policy is independent of production amount when acquisition costs are linear.     

考虑不同回收质量等级的再制造系统回收生产决策

废旧产品的回收再制造过程往往在回收质量、再制造成本、再制造产出率、再制造产品需求等方面存在不确定性因素,极大地增加了再制造生产管理决策的复杂性。本文在一个回收再制造系统中研究了存在多种回收质量等级时的两阶段回收—再制造联合优化决策问题,并扩展到需求与价格相关和再制造产出率随机两种情形。在最大化再制造商期望利润的决策目标下,基于每种回收质量等级的单位回收和再制造成本构造出再制造系统的有效生产前沿面,给出了不同决策情形下再制造商的最优回收数量、销售定价的解析解,并且分析了一些主要的参数对再制造商最优决策的影响。本文的研究结果表明：（1）含有多种回收质量等级的再制造系统中存在一个下凸的有效生产前沿面,不在该前沿面上的任何质量等级的回收产品都将不会被用于再制造;（2）在同等的政府补贴额度下,回收补贴方式对再制造商决策的影响程度大于再制造补贴方式;（3）当再制造品的市场需求与价格相关时,最优销售价格至少大于第一种被使用的回收质量等级的边际回收和再制造成本;（4）任意两种回收质量等级之间存在着替代或互补效应,由其成本差异决定,并且这种效应随着需求不确定性的增大而增大;（5）再制造产出率的不确定性和再制造品需求的不确定性之间存在"对冲"效应,这种效应随着再制造产出率不确定性的降低而减弱。本文的研究可为不确定性环境下再制造企业的回收、生产管理决策提供有益的管理启示。     

Capacity Allocation and Pricing Strategies for New Wireless Services

Indoor cell phone users often suffer poor connectivity. One promising solution to this issue, femtocell technology, has been rapidly developed and deployed over the past few years. One of the biggest challenges facing femtocell deployment is the lack of a clear business model. This study investigates the economic incentive for cellular operators (also called macrocell operators) to enable femtocell service by leasing spectrum resources to independent femtocell operators. We model the interactions between a macrocell operator, a femtocell operator, and end‐users as a three‐stage dynamic game, and derive the equilibrium pricing and capacity allocation decisions. We show that when spectrum resources are very limited, the macrocell operator has more incentive to lease spectrum to the femtocell operator, as femtocell services can help cover more users and improve the utilization efficiency of the limited spectrum resource. However, when the total spectrum resource is large, femtocell service offers significant competition to macrocell service and, as a result, the macrocell operator has less incentive to enable femtocell service. We also show the impact of the additional operational costs and limited coverage of femtocell service on equilibrium decisions, consumer surplus, and social welfare.     

Optimal Pricing,Ordering, and Return Policies for Consumer Goods

Our research addresses a firm that sells a product to consumers who are sensitive to both price and return policy. The operational decisions of interest are the selling price, return policy, and quantity of new product to purchase. We model a single selling season that is split into two periods where the boundary between periods is delineated by the opportunity to recover product returns and resell them. That is, returns in the first period can be recovered and sold in the second period. Returns also arise in the second period, but these may only be salvaged. We first analyze both deterministic and stochastic models, finding that the deterministic results largely carry over to the stochastic case. In addition, our results indicate that the model is quite insensitive to errors in the estimates of the parameter values, except for purchase cost and parameters related to demand. Finally, we perform an analysis on the value of various investments to improve financial performance. Results indicate that investments to reduce the recovery cost of returns or reduce returns uncertainty are minimal, while investments to increase recovery speed, reduce market uncertainty, and reduce the return rate can be quite valuable.     

An Auction Mechanism for Pricing and Capacity Allocation with Multiple Products

We consider a pricing and short‐term capacity allocation problem in the presence of buyers with orders for bundles of products. The supplier's objective is to maximize her net profit, computed as the difference between the revenue generated through sales of products and the production and inventory holding costs. The objective of each buyer is similarly profit maximization, where a buyer's profit is computed as the difference between the time‐dependent utility of the product bundle he plans to buy, expressed in monetary terms, and the price of the bundle. We assume that bundles' utilities are buyers' private information and address the problem of allocating the facility's output. We directly consider the products that constitute the supplier's output as market goods. We study the case where the supplier follows an anonymous and linear pricing strategy, with extensions that include quantity discounts and time‐dependent product and delivery prices. In this setting, the winner determination problem integrates the capacity allocation and scheduling decisions. We propose an iterative auction mechanism with non‐decreasing prices to solve this complex problem, and present a computational analysis to investigate the efficiency of the proposed method under supplier's different pricing strategies. Our analysis shows that the problem with private information can be effectively solved with the proposed auction mechanism. Furthermore, the results indicate that the auction mechanism achieves more than 80% of the system's profit, and the supplier receives a higher percentage of profit especially when the ratio of demand to available capacity is high.     

The Impact of Capacity Costs on Product Differentiation in Delivery Time,Delivery Reliability,and Price

We develop an analytical framework for studying the role capacity costs play in shaping the optimal differentiation strategy in terms of prices, delivery times, and delivery reliabilities of a profit‐maximizing firm selling two variants (express and regular) of a product in a capacitated environment. We first investigate three special cases. The first is an existing model of price and delivery time differentiation with exogenous reliabilities, which we only review. The second focuses on time‐based (i.e., length and reliability) differentiation with exogenous prices. The third deals with deciding on all features for an express variant when a regular product already exists in the marketplace. We subsequently address the integrative framework of time‐and‐price‐based differentiation for both products in a numerical study. Our results shed light on the role that customer preferences towards delivery times, reliabilities and prices, and the capacity costs (absolute and relative) have on the firm's optimal product positioning policy.     

考虑参照依赖与产品展示的体验式商品定价与订购策略

消费者在购买体验式商品时面临着产品价值的不确定性,因而会产生参照依赖行为。本文研究了考虑消费者参照依赖行为的定价与订购问题,并分析了产品展示策略的影响。研究发现,给定产品满足率时,只有当消费者获得高价值的概率大于某个临界值时,参照依赖下的最优价格才会高于没有参照依赖下的最优价格,并且产品价值维度与产品价格维度的参照依赖对最优价格起着相反的作用。进一步给出了最优订购量满足的条件,并发现在一定条件下最优价格随着订购量的增大而增大。当企业采取产品展示策略之后,会产生两方面的效应,一是消费者数量减少,二是剩余消费者的保留价格增大,此时最优价格随着展示系数的增大而增大。最后,通过数值分析得到了更多的管理启示。     

考虑策略性消费者的生鲜农产品定价和库存决策

消费者的策略性行为使零售商的生鲜农产品的定价和库存决策面临更大挑战。本文基于报童模型,综合考虑消费者的策略性行为,对生鲜农产品价值下降进行离散化处理。刻画策略性消费者的决策行为,构建零售商的单阶段和两阶段定价及库存决策模型,分析了产品价值剩余率对消费者行为、零售商最优定价、最优库存水平以及零售商利润的影响机理。研究发现,在单阶段模型中零售商最优价格和最优库存水平均随产品价值剩余率的递增而递增;而在两阶段模型中,第二阶段最优价格随价值剩余率的变化趋势可能存在阈值。     

零售商主导下生鲜农产品供应链的定价策略对比研究

运用RFID技术来监控与管理产品,零售商可以依据记录、传递的产品实时价值信息制定更为灵活的定价和订货策略,提升自身以及供应链的利润。针对生鲜农产品在价值损耗及消费者需求等方面进行特征分析,分别在固定定价、动态定价以及带有降价时点考虑的定价三种不同模式下,构建了单周期零售商的决策模型,得到各自的最优定价与订货策略,通过分析最优策略与关键参数之间的关系,发现:价值衰减系数越大,库存成本参数越大,三种模式下的总体零售价格都越小,价格的下调幅度越大;而两个参数对降价折扣时间点的影响却截然相反。进一步,着力在最优销售价格、订货总量与利润值三个方面对三种定价策略进行对比分析,结果显示基于RFID技术的灵活定价模式有助于零售商获取更大的市场需求量及更大的收益。数值实验进一步验证了理论研究的结果,为生鲜农产品供应链中对RFID技术的应用以及相应定价模式的选择提供了参考依据。     

“线上销售/回收+线下服务”的闭环供应链定价与服务决策

对于“线上销售/回收+线下服务”的闭环供应链模式,研究了制造商在正向和逆向渠道中都与服务商进行收益共享情况下的最优销售/回收定价决策和最优服务水平决策,并比较了制造商领导的Stackelberg博弈、服务商领导的Stackelberg博弈、制造商与服务商Nash均衡博弈三种情形下的最优决策和最优利润。结果表明：最优的新产品销售价格和正向渠道服务水平均与正向渠道收益分成比例呈正相关;最优的废旧产品回收价格与逆向渠道收益分成比例呈负相关,而最优的逆向渠道服务水平与之呈正相关。制造商和服务商的最优利润不仅受正逆向渠道收益分成比例的影响,而且与新产品生产成本的大小有关：当新产品生产成本较小时,处于领导地位的一方获得的最优利润最大,而当新产品生产成本增大到一定程度后,对方处于领导地位时自身获得的最优利润反而最大,而双方均势时各自获得的最优利润均不占优。