Product Pricing And Recycling In A Remanufacturing System

With the development of the society and economy,problems such as shortage of resources,environmental pollution and climate warming have become increasingly prominent.Remanufacturing can improve resource utilization and reduce pollutant emissions by recycling and reusing used products.Remanufacturing has attracted the extensive attention from practitioners and academic communities due to its considerable potential economic and ecological benefits.A two-echelon remanufacturing system motivated by the production practice is introduced in this thesis.In the remanufacturing system,the manufacturer produces new and remanufactured products,whereas the core remanufacturer recycles used products and makes remanufactured cores which are supplied to the manufacturer to make remanufactured products.A four-step Stackelberg game model is developed to investigate the two firms' interactive decisions with interactive production constraints.Analytical results show that,the core remanufacturer cannot fully satisfy the manufacturer's demand with adequate remanufactured cores when the transaction price is at a low level,conversely,the manufacturer cannot accept all remanufactured cores that the core remanufacturer is supplying due to the interactive production constraints.Interactive production constraints significantly influence the firms' decisions and the performances of remanufacturing system.We propose a cross-advertisement strategy to weaken the negative impacts of interactive production constraints,i.e.,the manufacturer's environmental advertisement on promoting used-product recoveries and the core remanufacturer's green marketing advertisement on promoting remanufactured-product sales.We find that either the manufacturer's environmental advertisement on used-product recoveries or the core remanufacturer's green marketing advertisement on remanufactured-product sales can benefit the two firms in terms of profits and the remanufacturing system in terms of environmental performances.In addition,we also extend the remanufacturing system with interactive production constraints to a monopoly situation and a duopoly situation,and further consider the impacts of consumers' price reference behavior on demand,and use utility theory to characterize the demand function.On this basis,a mathematical model is formulated to study the firms' optimal production pricing and recovery decisions under the two situations.The results show that the influences of consumers' price reference coefficient and other factors on the firms' production pricing and recycling decisions are not only related to the production cost of new products and remanufactured products,but also related to consumers' tolerance to the remanufactured products and setup cost coefficient.Moreover,by comparing the product pricing,manufacturer's profits and environmental performances of remanufacturing system between the two situations,we find that the differences of product pricing between the two situations are related to the production cost of remanufactured products,the differences of environmental performances of remanufacturing system between the two situations are related to the production cost of remanufactured products and setup cost coefficient.The authorization fee determines the manufacturer's strategic choice,and the threshold of the authorization fee is affected by the consumers' price reference coefficient.