Research On Pharmaceutical E-tailer Pricing And Collaborative Delivery

With the economic boost and population aging,the demand for healthcare services has grown rapidly in China.However,the shortage of medical resources makes it difficult and unaffordable for the public to get access to healthcare services.As an emerging service pattern,pharmaceutical e-tailer provides a new and feasible solution for this problem.In order to explore its effects on Medicare reimbursement and management strategy,this dissertation studies three decision problems in the view of the operation management of pharmaceutical e-tailers,including service investment and pricing decision,competitive pricing decision with National Drug Reimbursement List(NDRL),and collaborative delivery pricing decision based on “buy-online and pick-up-in-store”.From the analysis,the enlightening findings would provide beneficial suggestions for pharmaceutical e-tailers about operations management and for the government about how to deal with the problems accompanying the development of pharmaceutical e-tailers.First of all,this dissertation investigates how a monopolistic pharmaceutical e-tailer makes service investment and pricing decisions as a two-sided platform.It is found that the decision is decided mostly by the severity of the disease and potential market size.Overall,the pharmaceutical e-tailer platform can slash drugs’ prices to attract patients,who have already got medical consultation services on its platform,to buy medicines,so as to maximize profits.In addition,the effects of service investment vary with the severity of the disease.When the disease is mild,the main function of increasing service investment is to attract patients for consultation.With the increase of the severity of disease,service investment can effectively attract more patients to buy drugs after consultation.In addition,we find that for the pharmaceutical e-tailer platform,it is more profitable to charge for entry fees of doctors than to cooperate with them through revenue sharing of drugs.Secondly,given that medical e-tailers compete with traditional offline pharmacies and that the adjust of NDRL is affected by the participation of pharmaceutical e-tailers in the local healthcare market,the Multinomial Logit Model(MNL)is used to study how different pharmaceutical e-tailers compete with each other in price when considering the effects of NDRL and offline pharmacies.The study finds that for midpriced drugs,the entry of pharmaceutical e-tailers can effectively promote price competition,thus reducing the cost of the national healthcare insurance pool and improving consumer’s surplus so improving social welfare.Moreover,for the pharmaceutical e-tailer,a major factor affecting their competitive advantage is their ability to bargain with suppliers,that is,whether they can get a lower purchase price from suppliers.The brand attribute of pharmaceutical e-tailers can also affect its pricing strategy.Finally,we study the collaborative distribution between pharmaceutical e-tailers and offline pharmacies.In the Stackelberg game,we study how pharmaceutical e-tailers make decision strategies about logistics service pricing,distribution cycle,and the profit-sharing ratio with offline drugstores in collaborative distribution to maximize their profits.This dissertation finds that the pricing decisions of pharmaceutical e-tailer logistics services are mainly decided by market parameters(potential market size,price elasticity,etc.),while logistics parameters(fixed transportation cost,holding cost,etc.)have little impact on pricing decisions.Therefore,pharmaceutical e-tailers should pay more attention to market parameters when making pricing decisions.As for distribution cycle decisions,logistics parameters have a greater impact.The revenue sharing ratio decision of offline drugstores is mainly influenced by market parameters,and the transportation distance also affects the revenue sharing ratio decision.In addition,the Stackelberg game between pharmaceutical etailers and offline pharmacy would damage the whole profit of the supply chain,so pharmaceutical e-tailers could negotiate with the offline pharmacy to set a fixed sharing ratio or fixed fee at the beginning,which would be better for to whole supply chain and their own profit.The innovations of this dissertation are that(1)We consider both platform attributes and retailer attributes of pharmaceutical e-commerce,extending the bilateral platform theory to pharmaceutical e-commerce operations,establishing a pharmaceutical bilateral platform decision model,and finding the optimal strategy for pharmaceutical e-commerce in the full space.(2)We introduce the adjustment of NDRL into the price competition of e-commerce,a price competition model of pharmaceutical e-commerce based on MNL is constructed,and the competitive price strategy of pharmaceutical e-commerce is proposed.(3)Based on the background of the integration of online and offline medicine,the game model of cooperative distribution between pharmaceutical e-commerce and offline pharmacies is constructed,and the optimal strategies and key influencing factors of both parties in conducting the game are proposed.