Research On Dual-recycling Channel Design And Coordination Mechanism For WEEE Considering Consumer Behavior

The rapid development of the technology and the improvement of the social economy help to increase the updating of the electronic products. How to collect these WEEEs effectively becomes a significant social problem and urgently to be solved. In recent years, with the quick development of the technology of Internet and Internet of things, a new recycling model, i.e. online recycling mode, has appeared which provides a way for the WEEE processor to design his recycling network. However, introducing the online recycling channel may lead to conflictions between different channels, and then increase the cost to operate such dual recycling channel when the processor has a traditional recycling channel. Furthermore, the low environmental conscious of the national civil and incompletion of the recycling network increase the difficult to collect these WEEEs together. For this purpose, some recycling-enterprises have to redesign their recycling mode.Based on the above background, by using the theories and methods of the customer behavior, game theory and optimization, this thesis studies a two-echelon reverse supply chain with a single recycler and a Stackelberg processor, and investigates how this processor would improve the collection quantity and its profit with considering customer behavior(i.e. customer preference and customer premium). In addition, this thesis explores how to design feasible and effective contracts to coordinate a reverse supply chain with dual recycling channel. Specifically, this thesis mainly study form the following three aspects:First, we study the impact of customer preference of the recycling channel on the processor’s recycling strategy with a deterministic demand. By introducing customer preference of online recycling channel, we have conducted the recycling model which depends on customer preference of online recycling channel. Based on that, four channel scenarios are analyzed, which contain traditional recycling channel model, online recycling channel model, dual-recycling channel model with online recycling channel provided by the WEEE disposer and dual-recycling channel model with online recycling channel provided by the third-party network recycling platform. The result shows that the strategy that the disposer provides the online recycling channel by itself always dominates the others. Under a certain condition, the dual-recycling channel strategy that the third-party network recycling platform provides the online recycling channel is superior to the single one. Moreover, a Pareto zone exists under dual-recycling channel strategy, where both the WEEE disposers and collectors outperform their counterparts in the single recycling channel strategy.Second, we study how the customer premium influences the processor’s dual-recycling strategy when the demand is random. Considering the stochastic demand, we establish a detailed consumer recycling channel choice model whose collection quantity faced in each channel relies on both customer premium in online recycling channel and waiting/timing cost in traditional recycling channel. Then three reverse channel models are addressed to derive the optimal decisions, collection quantities as well as the maximal profits. The result shows that it cannot only force the recycler to raise the collective price, but also decrease the transferring price, by introducing the online recycling channel when the processor already has the traditional recycling channel. Furthermore, it helps to improve the collective quantity of WEEE, and increase the processor’s profit as well as the total profit of the reverse supply chain system. In addition, the dual-recycling channel strategy is always dominant over the single online recycling channel strategy, when the consumer premium is very high or very low, and vice versa. Lastly, the variance of the demand randomness has an important effect on the zone of the consumer premium where the online recycling channel strategy is better than the dual-recycling channel one.Finally, we also investigate how to coordinate a reverse supply chain with dual recycling channel. By constructing customer recycling channel choice model, we examine the questions in three scenarios, about recycling structure choice and coordination in a dual-recycling channel reverse supply chain, including the single traditional-recycling channel, the sole online-recycling channel and the hybrid dual-recycling channel. The result shows that the processor in dual-recycling channel mode always outperforms its counterpart in single recycling channel cases. From the point of environment view, however, the single online recycling strategy may be better than the dual recycling channel strategy under a certain condition. Moreover, we investigate the problem that how to coordinate the reverse supply chain with dual-recycling channel, and find that a contract consisting of the transfer price and the online recycling price can coordinate the reverse supply chain with dual-recycling channel. Two kinds of complementary contracts are proposed, a two-part tariff contract and a profit sharing contract, which allow both the recycler and the processor to be win-win, compared to the decentralized case. And we find that the consumer’s preference of the recycling channel has an important effect on the acceptance of the above contracts by the recycler and the processor.