Reaearch On Pricing Strategy In Closed-Loop Supply Chain When Remanufaturing Ratio Affects The Material Quality And The Collecting Efforts Is Variable

In the last decade, in order to protect the environments and achieve the goals of sustainable development, much attention has been paid to the research on the closed-loop supply chain. In this field, how to choose a suitable collection channel and how to price are very important issues with much significance. With respect to this topic, after reading up the relatively new developments with regards to product recovery in the literature and in practice, this thesis does some deep research in the following aspects: the requirements for the main players from the closed-loop supply chain with remanufacturing, the pricing strategy for the players when remanufacturing ratio affects the material quality, and the pricing strategy when collection efforts is variable. Some useful conclusions are summarized through qualitative and quantitative research.The main contents of this thesis are as follows:As the preface, Chapter 1 introduces the research background and the purpose of this paper. After reviewing the related literature, Chapter 1 discusses the limitation of the existing researches and highlights the key issues to be solved in this paper. This chapter provides a necessary academic basis for the following chapters.The new requirements for the main players in closed-loop supply chain are detailed in Chapter 2. And then, three typical collection channels are introduced: (1) manufacturers collecting the products directly from the customers; (2) retailers collecting and paying for this; (3) subcontracting the collection activity to a third party. Some typical examples are given for each collection channel. This chapter gives a theoretic support for the following analysis.In chapter 3, it is assumed that when remanufacturing ratio increases, the material supplied by the supplier gets worse in quality, which caused the remanufacturing cost’s rise. Some math models are set up to seek the best pricing strategy for the manufacturer and the material supplier. We find that as the remanufacturing ratio increases, the profit of the manufacturer increases first and then decrease while the material supplier’s profits decrease linearly.In Chapter 4, it’s assumed the collection effort is variable. More efforts the collector pay, more output he/she can get, but more cost for collection meantime. We do research on the best pricing strategy for all players in closed-loop supply chain in this condition. The research proved that when the efforts for collection increase, the total profits for every system increase first and then decrease. The total system profits are unrelated with the executants for collections. The same level of collection efforts caused the same system total profits.