Collection Responsibility Choice for Competing E-Tailing Supply Chains With Consumer Returns
研究了竞争性电商供应链中，价格竞争、竞争对手渠道结构和退货政策如何影响制造商与电商平台之间的退货回收责任选择，发现制造商回收在特定条件下对双方更有利。
For implementing consumer returns policy in e-tailing, to whom consumers should return their purchases is a crucial operations decision. We develop game models of competing e-tailing supply chains to study how price competition, channel structure of competitor, and consumer returns policy affect collection responsibility scenario. There are two collection responsibility scenarios: manufacturer collection and electronic retailer (e-tailer) collection. We find that in the common e-tailer setting, the channel collection efficiency and existence of the fixed cost are important for the manufacturer to decide whether to accept the e-tailer's transfer of collection responsibility; if manufacturer collection is optimal for a manufacturer, then it is a <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">win-win</i> scenario for both the manufacturer and the e-tailer, i.e., they are better off using manufacturer collection. If e-tailer collection has higher channel efficiency than manufacturer collection, then e-tailer collection is chosen; otherwise, in the presence of fixed cost, we show that 1) both manufacturers collect returned products if market scale is large, the e-tailer collects them if market scale is small; otherwise, different collection responsibility scenarios are used; 2) price competition accounts for the coexistence of different scenarios and reduces the range of manufacturer collection; 3) the channel structure of competitor can reverse the effect of price competition degree on collection responsibility; and 4) the manufacturer with higher restocking fee has a smaller incentive to collect returns products.