New Product Design under Channel Acceptance: Brick‐and‐Mortar,Online‐Exclusive,or Brick‐and‐Click

In recent years, an increasing number of brick‐and‐mortar retailers have entered into the new brick‐and‐click era. Within this context, when a manufacturer presents a new product offering to a retailer, the ultimate decision is often made by the retailer regarding (1) whether to carry the new product, and (2) the channel outlet the product will be carried in (i.e., in‐store only, online‐exclusive, or brick‐and‐click). In response to this trend, we examine how a manufacturer may use product design to influence a dual‐channel retailer's outlet designation decision. This is the first study to investigate a manufacturer's optimal product design strategy when a brick‐and‐mortar retailer expands online. We demonstrate that, to induce the retailer to carry a new product both offline and online, it may not always be optimal for the manufacturer to enhance product quality (compared with when the retailer only operates offline). With the online store addition, the retailer may also be incentivized to adjust his participation criterion to a level less than what is determined by his outside option.     

预测信息分享对制造商开通直销渠道的影响

研究了零售商预测信息分享对制造商渠道结构选择的影响.运用不完全信息动态博弈分别建立了单渠道和双渠道供应链决策模型,得到了贝叶斯均衡的渠道价格和各方最优期望利润.研究发现当零售商的需求预测精度比较低时,制造商应当开通直销渠道.零售商没有动机将预测信息与制造商分享.设计了一个信息分享补偿机制使得零售商能自愿分享其私有信息.在信息分享补偿机制下,虽然制造商为获取零售商预测信息付出了成本,但是依然有动机开通直销渠道.     

基于制造商网络渠道选择的双渠道供应链定价 与服务决策研究

本文考虑由线下零售商实体销售与制造商网络销售构成的网络直销,以及由线下零售商实体销售与线上零售商网络销售构成的网络分销两种制造商双渠道模式,研究“搭便车”行为下制造商模式选择和供应链最优定价与服务决策。研究发现:制造商的渠道选择策略与“搭便车”行为程度、消费者偏好网络渠道程度、价格敏感系数等有关。尤其当消费者受到的服务且对价格的敏感性相同时,制造商会选择网络直销双渠道模式。进一步分析消费者“搭便车”行为和网络渠道偏好对制造商渠道选择和定价决策影响发现,制造商在消费者偏好网络渠道程度比较低时应选择网络分销双渠道模式,而当消费者网络渠道偏好和“搭便车”行为程度都比较高时,制造商应选择网络直销双渠道模式。消费者网络渠道偏好或“搭便车”行为程度越大,两种模式下批发价格应设置的更低。网络直销渠道模式下“搭便车”行为程度越大,网络渠道销售价格应设置的更低,而消费者网络渠道偏好程度越大,网络渠道销售价格应设置得更高。     

Strategic Motive for Introducing Internet Channels in a Supply Chain

Rapid advances of information technology in recent years have enabled both the manufacturers and the retailers to operate their own Internet channels. In this study, we investigate the interaction between the capabilities of introducing the Internet channels, the pricing strategies, and the channel structure. We classify consumers into two segments: grocery shoppers attach a higher utility from purchasing through the physical channel, whereas a priori Internet shoppers prefer purchasing online. We find that when the Internet shoppers are either highly profitable or fairly unimportant, the manufacturer prefers to facilitate the channel separation either through his own Internet channel or the retailer's. In the intermediate region, however, the manufacturer encroaches the grocery shoppers and steals the demand from the retailer's physical channel. With horizontal competition between retailers, a priori symmetric retailers may adopt different channel strategies as a stable market equilibrium. The manufacturer may willingly give up his Internet channel and leverage on the retailer competition. When the manufacturer sells through an online e‐tailer, Internet shoppers may be induced to purchase through the physical channel. This reverse encroachment strategy emerges because selling through the e‐tailer leads to a more severe double marginalization problem.     

Optimal Contract Design for Mixed Channels Under Information Asymmetry

The mixed‐channel model is becoming increasingly popular in the marketplace. In this model, a firm selling through the traditional supply chain of wholesaler and retailer opens a direct channel to the customer through Internet sales. Because both channels have their respective advantages, the manufacturer is attracted to this business model. However, it also leads to channel conflict, with the retailer feeling threatened by direct competition. One way of eliminating the possibility of this channel conflict, where the retailer is allowed to add value to the product to differentiate its offering to the customers, is proposed in this paper. The retailer is also given full authority to make pricing decisions. This paper presents a model, under this scenario, of obtaining optimum pricing decisions by both parties, the amount of value added by the retailer, and the manufacturer's wholesale price to the retailer. Our model incorporates information asymmetry, where the manufacturer has incomplete information about the retailer's cost of adding value. We obtain closed‐form contracts with incomplete information and compare them with those with complete channel coordination. We also develop a number of managerial guidelines and identify future research topics.     

Implications for the Role of Retailers in Quality Assurance

We investigate a manufacturer–retailer channel to explore the role of a retailer in assuring the quality of a manufacturer's product as a quality gatekeeper. Such a gatekeeping activity can entail a reduction in the defective rate for consumers, if the retailer charges the manufacturer a penalty for each identified defect that is no smaller than the market penalty for an unidentified defect. As a result of the retailer's gatekeeping, the change in the negotiated wholesale price only depends on the manufacturer's individual benefit, whereas the change in the retailer's optimal retail price is associated with the channel‐wide benefit. When the impact of quality relative to retail price on demand is higher, the retailer benefits more from her gatekeeping activity, thus having a greater incentive to take on the quality gatekeeping responsibility. Moreover, the retailer's gatekeeping generates a larger increase in the demand as well as each firm's profit, when the retailer has a stronger relative bargaining power.     

不同双渠道结构下制造商的定价决策与渠道选择

根据网上渠道不同销售模式的特征将其划分为网上直销双渠道、网上分销双渠道和网上代销双渠道。分析在制造商主导的双渠道供应链中，三种不同双渠道结构下价格竞争系数、网上直销成本和佣金比例系数对其他经济变量的影响，以及制造商的最优定价决策与渠道选择问题。研究表明：制造商在保证一定网上直销单位成本和佣金比例系数条件下，网上代销双渠道和网上直销双渠道中获取的利润高于网上分销双渠道；在网络代销双渠道中，制造商利润随着佣金比例系数增加而减少，而传统零售商和网络零售商的利润会随着佣金比例系数增加而增加。     

Supply Chain Conflict Due to Store Brands: The Value of Wholesale Price Commitment in a Retail Supply Chain*

Store brands are of increasing importance in retail supply chains, often causing channel conflict, as the retailer's product directly competes with the manufacturer's national brand. Extant research on the resulting channel interactions either assumes the national brand manufacturer can credibly commit to maintaining a wholesale price or that he lacks such ability. However, these two scenarios imply very different supply chain interactions, as only a national brand manufacturer with commitment ability can strategically adjust a national brand wholesale price to prevent a store brand introduction by the retailer. We specifically analyze the impact of this assumption on the manufacturer, the retailer, and the customers. We determine when long‐term contracts that provide the manufacturer with such commitment ability can improve supply chain profitability.     

Distribution Channel Strategies for a Manufacturer with Complementary Products

In this article, we consider distribution channel strategies for an incumbent manufacturer who produces two complementary products and must determine whether or not to have another company to sell its products. We identify factors that affect the manufacturer's motivation to use dual‐channel distribution. Our results show that both complementarity between complements and product substitutability between firms influence the manufacturer's channel strategy. We find that if the potential entrant does not produce the complement of the primary product, a higher complementary effect for the complement will weaken the motivation of the incumbent to add an indirect channel. We also find that the incumbent has a stronger incentive to add the indirect channel when a product's substitutability is high. Furthermore, we show that when the two channels have the same pricing power, the incumbent has a stronger incentive to sell through the indirect channel in a higher pricing power environment.     

零售商信息禀赋优势下制造商电商直销渠道决策

在供应链中由于零售商相比制造商掌握更多消费者信息,能够对市场需求进行预测,因此制造商在建立直销渠道决策时往往面临着市场需求信息的不对称。本文考虑一个由单个制造商和单个零售商组成的供应链,其中零售商向制造商订购产品并销售给终端市场,制造商可能建立直销渠道将产品直接销售给消费者。通过构建制造商无入侵、对称信息下和不对称信息下制造商入侵三种情形下的博弈模型,本文分析了制造商建立直销渠道决策和零售商的订货决策。研究发现,尽管零售商具有信息禀赋优势,制造商建立直销渠道总是能够获得更多的利润,并且在信息不对称情况下制造商建立直销渠道获得的利润大于在信息对称情况下获得的利润。而零售商与之相反,在制造商掌握市场预测信息的情况下零售商的收益更高,供应链总收益在对称信息的情况下最高。进一步考虑制造商按照自身信息禀赋进行备货量决策的情况,可以得到按照自身信息禀赋与零售商同时决策时制造商建立直销渠道的利润大于信息对称和信息不对称两种情况下的利润。     

Gray Markets and Supply Chain Incentives

“Gray markets” are unauthorized channels that distribute a branded product without the manufacturer's permission. Since gray markets are not officially sanctioned by the manufacturer, their existence is assumed to hurt the manufacturer. Yet manufacturers sometimes tolerate or even encourage gray market activities. We investigate the incentives of a manufacturer and its authorized retailer to engage in (or tolerate) gray markets. The firms need to consider the trade‐off between the positive effects of a gray market (price discrimination and cost savings) and the negative effects (cannibalization of sales and a loss in consumer valuation). Generally, gray markets can be categorized into two types: (i) a “local gray market,” where a retailer diverts products to unauthorized sellers operating in the same region as the retailer; and, (ii) “bootlegging,” where the retailer diverts products to unauthorized sellers in another market where the manufacturer sells through a direct channel. We characterize the equilibrium in each type of gray market and identify conditions under which the retailer will divert products to the gray market. Incentive problems are more complicated when the retailer bootlegs and, in this case, we show that conflicting incentives may lead to the emergence of a gray market where both the manufacturer's and retailer's profits decrease.     

制造商引入在线渠道的双渠道价格与服务竞争策略

为了削弱传统零售商在渠道博弈中的强势地位,制造商尝试引入直接在线渠道与传统零售商竞争。针对零售商价格领导权的渠道结构,本文在分析双渠道竞争时考虑了服务在战略决策中的价值,并将消费者区分为高服务偏好的消费者和低服务偏好的消费者。研究表明,仅当产品在线适合度足够高时,在零售商占主导权的渠道中,制造商引入在线渠道的战略效果才能实现,能导致制造商利润的增加,产品在线的适合度越高,利润提高越显著。当产品在线适合度足够高时,制造商引入在线渠道能够激励零售商提高服务质量,而且产品在线的适合度越高,服务质量提高越明显;在线渠道的引入能达到制造商和零售商双赢的效果;制造商利润和零售商利润都会随着高服务偏好消费者比例和服务的边际效用的提高而增加。     

Cooperative Advertising and Pricing in a Dynamic Stochastic Supply Chain: Feedback Stackelberg Strategies

Cooperative (co‐op) advertising is an important instrument for aligning manufacturer and retailer decisions in supply chains. In this, the manufacturer announces a co‐op advertising policy, i.e., a participation rate that specifies the percentage of the retailer's advertising expenditure that it will provide. In addition, it also announces the wholesale price. In response, the retailer chooses its optimal advertising and pricing policies. We model this supply chain problem as a stochastic Stackelberg differential game whose dynamics follows Sethi's stochastic sales‐advertising model. We obtain the condition when offering co‐op advertising is optimal for the manufacturer. We provide in feedback form the optimal advertising and pricing policies for the manufacturer and the retailer. We contrast the results with the advertising and price decisions of the vertically integrated channel, and suggest a method for coordinating the channel.     

Impacts of demand uncertainty on retailer's dominance and manufacturer-retailer supply chain cooperation

Recent studies in marketing and distribution channels have shown that the balance of power between manufacturers and retailers is shifting. Based on this observation, we investigate a two-echelon supply chain with a manufacturer and a retailer in this paper. We first develop retailer-dominant non-cooperative game models by introducing a sensitivity of retailer's order quantity to manufacturer's wholesale price; then we analyze two cooperative scenarios, in which the Nash bargaining model is utilized to implement profit sharing between the manufacturer and the retailer. Under the assumption that the manufacturer and the retailer are risk-neutral, we find that the manufacturer and the retailer can bargain to cooperate at any level of retail-market demand uncertainty with exogenous retail price. However, the cooperation is conditional on retail-market demand uncertainty with endogenous retail price: it can be implemented if the fluctuation of retail-market demand is relatively small, and the measure of retail-market demand uncertainty does not exceed an upper bound. Theoretical and numerical analyses show that the retailer's dominance over the manufacturer increases with the increase in the sensitivity of retailer's order quantity to manufacturer's wholesale price under a limitation of retail-market demand uncertainty. Numerical analyses also show that the retailer's dominance decreases with the increase in retail-market demand uncertainty.     

How Collection Cost Structure Drives a Manufacturer's Reverse Channel Choice

This note discusses the impact of collection cost structure on the optimal reverse channel choice of manufacturers who remanufacture their own products. Using collection cost functions that capture collection rate and collection volume dependency, we show that the optimal reverse channel choice (retailer‐ vs. manufacturer‐managed collection) is driven by how the cost structure moderates the manufacturer's ability to shape the retailer's sales and collection quantity decisions.     

随机需求和联合促销下双渠道供应链的竞争与协调

针对制造商同时拥有零售渠道和网上直销渠道的双渠道供应链系统,在随机需求和联合促销情况下,对制造商和零售商之间的价格竞争和协调问题进行研究.研究表明价格的纳什均衡解存在,网上渠道的最优价格随零售商促销努力程度的增大而降低.当制造商分担促销成本的比例上升时,零售商促销的努力程度会增加.当比例值较低时,零售商的努力程度变化不大;当比例值超过一定数值时,零售商的努力程度会显著增加.回购契约能给制造商和零售商双方带来好处,但不能实现双渠道供应链的协调.     

不同权力结构下制造商双渠道供应链的博弈分析

在单个拥有线下传统批发及线上直销双渠道的制造商和单个零售商组成的供应链中,基于供应链成员博弈权力的差异,构建制造商占优或零售商占优的两类Stackelberg博弈及双方同等权力的Nash博弈模型,分析了三种博弈权力结构对供应链成员价格,需求和利润的影响。研究发现：当制造商线下传统批发渠道所占市场份额较小时,（1）渠道交叉价格弹性系数为0时和不为0时,三种博弈权力结构对制造商双渠道供应链均衡解的影响具有一定的鲁棒性;（2）三种博弈权力结构下,制造商线上直销渠道价格相同;两类Stackelberg博弈权力结构下,线下传统批发渠道价格相同且大于Nash博弈下的传统渠道价格;制造商批发价格随其博弈主导地位下降逐渐降低;（3）当渠道交叉价格弹性系数为0时,三种博弈权力结构对线上直销渠道需求的影响是无差异的;当渠道间交叉价格弹性系数不为0时,两类Stackelberg博弈权力结构下的线下传统批发渠道需求相同且小于Nash博弈下的传统渠道需求,线上直销渠道需求相同且大于Nash博弈下的线上直销渠道需求;（4）三种博弈策略下,制造商收益及零售商收益随其博弈主导地位下降逐渐降低;Nash博弈下,供应链总利润最大。     

基于制造商和零售商自有品牌竞争的供应链广告决策

考虑一个零售商同时出售制造商品牌产品和零售商自有品牌产品的营销渠道,这两类产品之间存在一定竞争性。制造商与零售商分别进行广告投资促销并累计商誉,且制造商与零售商共同分担零售商的广告投资成本。假设零售商广告促销活动对制造商品牌商誉存在负面影响。运用微分对策的方法求解动态环境下Stackel-berg主从博弈下的最优决策,并分析了零售商和制造商处参数对决策的影响。最后证明,Stackelberg主从博弈决策优于Nash非合作博弈决策。     

Equilibrium Financing in a Distribution Channel with Capital Constraint

There exist capital constraints in many distribution channels. We examine a channel consisting of one manufacturer and one retailer, where the retailer is capital constrained. The retailer may fund its business by borrowing credit either from a competitive bank market or from the manufacturer, provided the latter is willing to lend. When only one credit type (either bank or trade credit) is viable, we show that trade credit financing generally charges a higher wholesale price and thus becomes less attractive than bank credit financing for the retailer. When both bank and trade credits are viable, the unique equilibrium is trade credit financing if production cost is relatively low but is bank credit financing otherwise. We also study the case where both the retailer and the manufacturer are capital constrained and demonstrate that, to improve the overall supply chain efficiency, the bank should finance the manufacturer if production cost is low but finance the retailer otherwise. Our analysis further suggests that the equilibrium region of trade credit financing shrinks as demand variability or the retailer's internal capital level increases.     

The Effect of Delayed Incentives on Supply Chain Profits and Consumer Surplus

We examine the use of consumer cash mail‐in rebates offered by a manufacturer in a Stackelberg game where the manufacturer is the leader and the retailer is the follower. Our analysis indicates that rebates are profitable for manufacturers if consumers are inconsistent in the sense that their rebate valuation when they make purchase decisions is independent of their redemption probabilities when they make redemption decisions. If the manufacturer keeps the wholesale price unchanged, then the rebate increases the retailer's profit by a larger amount than the increase in the manufacturer's profit. If the manufacturer jointly optimizes the wholesale price and rebate, then the increase in the manufacturer's profit is twice the increase in the retailer's profit. The retailer responds to rebates by increasing the retail price, which increases the margin paid by consumers who do not redeem the rebate. On average, consumer surplus decreases when it is optimal for manufacturers to offer rebates. We suggest incentive schemes that make it worthwhile for retailers to limit the price increase. In these incentive schemes, the manufacturer imposes a negative relationship between the rebate value and the retail price. We show that such incentives increase supply chain profits.