Optimizied Decisions Of Supply Chain With Consumer Returns Under Consignment Contract

During the process of decision-marking about product price and inventory, the enterprise should consider the impacts from the actual demand of product and the market competition strength onto the profits, and the enterprise should take the impact of customer behaviors into account, such as strategy, reference price,heterogeneity, etc. If the enterprise ignores the customer behavior, there will lead to a larger deviation in decision-making, and then it would damage the profits of enterprise or supply chain. Among the various customer behaviors, the consumer returns exist widely in the real life, and a growing number of false failure returns has brought great persecution to merchants. If the merchants pay more attention to the influence from the customer returns during the enterprise operation, the enterprise would have the healthy and stable developments. In addition,accompanying with the developments of e-business, the consignment contract has been widely used in reality. Therefore, there is of theoretical value and practical significance when discussing the problems of optimizied decisions of supply chain with customer returns under consignment contract.Note that the existing results about the supply chain under consignment contract have not considered the customer behaviors. Hence, this thesis discusses the problems of the optimizied decisions of supply chain with customer returns under consignment contract and proposes some new strategies. The aim of this thesis is to enrich the results of supply chain under consignment contract from the theoretical viewpoint, and provide the guidance and suggestion for the enterprise's operation.Firstly, some related knowledge of consumer return in supply chain are summarized, such as the classification and managed mode of returns, the effect from returns on supply chain, and the methods to reduce the return rates. Secondly, some related problems are mentioned including the definition of the consignment contract,the characteristics of the supply chain under consignment contract and some management problems of supply chain under consignment contract with consumer returns. Thirdly, the game structures of the participating agents are analyzed for the supply chain system under consignment contract, the employed game methods(including Nash non-cooperation game and Stackelberg leader-follower game) are introduced, and the utilized models are given. Furthermore, the overall framework for the study of the optimizied decisions of the supply chain under consignment contract with consumer returns is presented.According to the characteristics of the vendor-managed inventory in supply chain under consignment contract, the retailer-leading Stackelberg game model is established and the selection problem of return policy for supplier is studied by fully taking the positive and negative effects of customer returns policy into account. By solving and comparing the game equilibriums under different policies, the market conditions are given,where the supplier is willing to provide the return service to consumers. Based on the proposed conditions, the supplier can make appropriate choice of return police. In addition, by considering the interaction between the consumer return police and the sales promotion, the effect of sales promotion on the choice of supplier' returns police is discussed. Finally, the research is further generalized within a competitive environment.Offering the return service has become a widely used one of the strategies for promoting the product competitiveness. During the process of decision-marking of supply chain members, there is a need to fully take the impact of the consumer returns into account, especially the negative impact. Hence, the problems of the supply chain management decisions under consignment contract are studied in competitive and non-competitive situations respectively,where the involved management decisions include the product inventory, pricing and investment of promotion, and so on. Moreover, the effects from the consumer returns on the optimal decisions are analyzed. Finally, new contracts are proposed according to different risks shared by the members in the supply chain under consignment contract, and then the coordination of the supply chain is achieved.When the supplier provides the consumer return service, the supplier needs to reduce high product return rate and enhancing the store-assistance service level can be seen as one of the effective methods. Firstly, the differential equation is used to describe the dynamic evolution of the store-assistance service level, the influence of the store-assistance service level on product return rate is characterized, and the optimal store-assistance service investment strategies of the supply chain are given under the decentralized and centralized modes by using the methods of differential game. Secondly, based on the real-time dynamics of the store-assistance service level, the dynamic consignment price contract is designed to achieve the coordination of the supply chain, and the numerical simulations are utilized to verify the feasibility and the effectiveness of the developed contract. At last, the problem is further generalized to discuss how to reduce the product return rate and coordinate the supply chain in a competitive environment.By applying the proposed research results for supply chain with consumer return under consignment contract, the empirical research is conducted for a supply chain with A company and jd.com under consignment contract. In View of analyzing the amounts of sales and returns of A company during specified month in 2015,a proper product demand model is established. Based on the presented research results,both the inventory and promotion investment decisions of the supply chain members are analyzed, the contract menu guaranteeing the coordination is designed for the enterprise, which can provide the scientific theory reference for the enterprise when making the reasonable decisions.