A Study On Supply Chain Coordination Model With Retailers’ Fairness Concern Considered

Supply chain management has always been an important area in management research, and the supply chain coordination is a hot topic in this field. After a few decades’ development, there emerged a big number of research results around supply chain coordination. Those theoretic results guide the supply chain management activities in the real business world. But the traditional supply chain management research is mostly built on the assumption that the participants are completely rational and self-interested. Those assumptions have suffered a great challenge in the middle of 20 century. A lot of empirical research have proved that the decision maker is not completely rational and self-interested, the real decision making process are so different from the theoretical predictions. The decision maker’s risk preference, fairness preference, reciprocity preference and other psychological behaviors have an important influence on the final decision. Put the psychological behavior factors into the traditional supply chain coordination theory and models are becoming the new hot topics in supply chain coordination research. Among many psychological factors, the fairness concern, as the most obvious and widely held psychological behavior, is the first factor that has been introduced into the traditional research. This thesis selects the retailer among all the participants (supplier, manufacturer, and retailer) as the decision maker, study several topics with retailer’s fairness concern in consideration, the contents can be divided into three points.(1) Study the supply chain coordination model under fuzzy demands considering the retailer’s fairness concern. Aiming to solve the problems that the demands are hard to determine and decision is influence by the psychological activity. This thesis proposed a supply chain coordination model under fuzzy demands considering the retailer’s fairness concern. With the retailer’s fairness concern and fuzzy demand in consideration, this thesis adopt whole scale-price contract, buy-back contract and benefits-sharing contract to discuss the influence of decision maker’s psychological behavior on the supply chain coordination under fuzzy demands.(2) Study the supply chain coordination model considering retailer’s fairness concern under random demand. The existing research use the assumption that the order quantity in centralize decision is equal to the order quantity in decentralized decision as the coordination proof, which is not reasonable. So this thesis propose a general judgment method about the supplier’s scale price and coordination, and emphasize on the influence of fairness concern on the supply chain coordination and how to improve the incoordination status under the fairness concern condition.(3) Study the supply chain model of single retailer-multiple suppliers with retailer’s fairness concern. On the basis of explore the existing research, this thesis builds a supply chain model of single retailer-multiple suppliers.considering the retailer’s fairness concern and propose an selection method of retailers. Introduce the retailer’s fairness concern into the supply chain coordination model and emphasize on the retailer’s fairness concern, the retailers’ relative competition status and the influence of retailers’ number on the supply chain coordination and supply chain system’s performance.Those three supply chain coordination models considering retailer’s fairness concern are respectively under fuzzy demands, random demands and single retailer-multiple supplier condition, among them, when use the order quantity in decentralize decision is equal to the order quantity in centralize decision as the basis of judgment, the fairness concern has no influence on the supply chain’s coordination under fuzzy demands. When use the pareto improvement as the basis of judgment, the supply chain coordination model cannot reach coordination on scale price with retailer’s fairness concern under random demands, however when under buy-back contract and benefit-sharing contract, the former one can reach the coordination status, and the latter whole supply chain performance can be improved. The coordination level of single-retailer multiple supplier with retailer’s fairness concern is influenced by the fairness concern sensitive coefficient and the relative competitive status. The model built in this paper is a meaningful trial of introducing fairness preference into traditional supply chain coordination model, an extension and improvement of traditional supply chain model and has reference significance for the participants of supply chain.