Product service supply chain network competition: an equilibrium with multiple tiers and members
构建了多制造商和多零售商的产品服务供应链网络竞争模型，通过变分不等式求解非合作博弈均衡，发现引入服务竞争后制造商和零售商利润均提升，且零售商服务需求敏感度对整体收入增长贡献更大。
To overcome product homogenisation issues, an increasing number of supply chain members have been binding their competitive advantages to services which extend supply chain competition to a new dimension. This paper proposes a product service supply chain (PSSC) network competition model with multiple competing manufacturers and retailers offering demand-enhancing and costly services. In order to obtain the decision-making results in a non-cooperative game context, equilibrium conditions are established using variational inequality, and the qualitative properties are discussed. We compare the two competition scenarios, price competition only and simultaneous price and service competition, to discover the impact of service-offering on supply chain members. After introducing the service competition, both manufacturers and retailers realise higher profits and marginal profits with the same service costs. In contrast, the manufacturers' marginal profits achieve higher growth rates. We also find that (a) the increase of the demand sensitivities to the service levels of retailers would contribute more to the revenue growth of the whole PSSC network and (b) when service costs are different for manufacturers and retailers, the optimal decision-making on service levels are not only affected by the service costs of the members in the same tier but also correlated with those in other tiers.