The impact of third-party remanufacturing on the forward supply chain: a blessing or a curse?
通过博弈模型研究第三方再制造商进入对原始设备制造商和供应商的影响，发现第三方再制造可能降低批发价，使供应链双方受益，而内部再制造则引发对抗。
It is widely agreed that the entry of third-party remanufacturers (TPRs) hurts original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) because remanufacturing cannibalises the new product sales. In this paper, motivated by the practice of mobile phone remanufacturing, we develop a game theoretical model to revisit the impact of third-party remanufacturing on a forward supply chain in which one OEM purchases critical components from one dominant supplier. The OEM may operate the remanufacturing business as cost-efficient as the TPR. Our analytical results show that regardless of the OEM’s remanufacturing capability, third-party remanufacturing could be beneficial to the OEM in that the supplier would lower the wholesale price as a response to the entry of the TPR; in addition, compared with the case without remanufacturing, third-party remanufacturing is always detrimental to the supplier, but the supplier should not always attempt to deter the entry of the TPR because third-party remanufacturing could be less detrimental than the OEM’s in-house remanufacturing. Under certain conditions, the two players in the forward supply chain both prefer third-party remanufacturing over in-house remanufacturing. The key intuition driving this finding is that third-party remanufacturing makes the OEM and the supplier allied; while in-house remanufacturing makes them against each other.