Inventory And Pricing Policies Management With Fresh Food Supply Chain

Nowadays supply chain management with fresh food becomesextraordinarily important, it has been attracting worldwide academic andindustrial attentions. The existing fresh food related researchesdemonstrates the important of this issue. Extra emphasis still focuses on theoptimal ordering and pricing policies. Current researches, however, are stilllimited in the scope of perishable commodities. Those researches related tofresh foods mainly focus only on the impact on “quantity” cause by theperishable nature of fresh food, and is rarely associated with the impact on“quality” due to the characteristics of fresh food. At the same time, fewresearches involve theoretical analysis for competition and coordinationbetween distributed supply chain companies with fresh foods, few involvequantitative study on control the negative “quality” and “quantity” impact ofthe perishable nature of fresh food fundamentally. Based on above thoughts,this work focus on the supply chain management of fresh foods, investigatesthe competitive and cooperative relationship between upstream anddownstream companies along a supply chain and strategy of supply chainparticipants for controlling the spoilage rate of fresh foods.This thesis consists of five chapters. The content of each chapter issummarized as follows: Chapter1illuminates the research objectives andthe adapted methodology; Chapter2reviews the related literatures by usingclassification method; Chapter3adapts game theory to analyze a typicaltwo-echelon distributed supply chain with one manufacture, one retailer anda single fresh food. This chapter includes: analysis on the optimal pricingpolicy for the manufacturer and the optimal pricing and ordering strategies for the retailer under Nash game approach, manufacture-driven Stackelberggame, retailer-driven Stackelberg game and centralized system, andcompares the differences between above situations and designs a simpleprofits distribution mechanism to prompt the coordination of the retailer andthe manufacture, and also gives typical numeric examples to furtherillustrate the relevant conclusions at the end; Chapter4, based on theprevious chapter, further analyzes the optimal pricing, ordering andfreshness-keeping efforts strategies of the retailer, Two situations areconsidered in this chapter, one is under price related demand, and the otheris under price and freshness related demand; The last chapter summarizes allthe work of this thesis and gives some useful suggestions for futureresearches.In brief, this research focuses on a fresh food supply chain system, andstrives to get the optimal ordering and pricing policies and cost investmentstrategies in the aforementioned conditions. It enables succinct andimplementable approaches to solve the problem and enriches correspondingtheoretical foundation.