Price Incentives and Coordination in a Two‐Product Decentralized Supply Chain
研究了分散供应链中销售两种产品变体的竞争零售商的价格激励，发现价格扭曲随消费者跨店旅行成本增加而减少，但随店内产品切换成本变化非单调，并提出了一个帕累托改进的协调合同。
ABSTRACT We investigate pricing incentives for competing retailers who distribute two variants of a manufacturer's product in a decentralized supply chain. Under a two‐dimensional Hotelling model, we derive decentralized retailers' prices for the products, and distortions in pricing when compared to centrally optimal prices. We show that price distortions decrease as consumers' travel cost between retailers increases, due to less intense competition. However, price distortions do not change monotonically in consumers' switching cost between products within stores. To fix decentralized retailers' price distortions, we construct a two‐part pricing contract that coordinates the supply chain. We show that the coordinating contract is Pareto‐improving and analyze increase in the supply chain profit under coordination.