消费者退货对在线零售商促销与合同设计的影响研究

针对由制造商和在线零售商组成的供应链系统,在存在消费者退货情形下,考虑在线零售商在线上渠道提供促销与退款保证服务,其中在线零售商促销成本为其私有信息,建立了信息不对称下的供应链博弈模型,研究了在线零售商的最优促销策略与供应链合同设计问题;进而分析了不对称信息对供应链均衡的影响,考察了退款保证对供应双方期望利润、信息价值以及消费者剩余的影响。研究发现,当制造商在决策合同参数(设计合同)时,需要在在线零售商信息租金与供应链系统绩效损失之间进行权衡;若满足一定条件,制造商和在线零售商之间进行谈判并能够实现信息共享而分享整个系统的利润;当退货产品总是会给供应链成员造成损失时,退款保证会导致制造商和零售商期望利润的损失,但在一定条件下却能提升消费者剩余。

The Impact of Consumer Returns on the Promotion Strategies and Contract Design of Online Retailer

The Internet has made online shopping a global daily phenomenon. To stay competitive, many click-and-mortar retailers have intensified their online promotions, which have become a core marketing tactic for businesses without physical stores. In 2017, U.S. online retail sales surpassed MYM370 billion, while that of Chinese websites reached approximately RMB 7 trillion. Customers, however, cannot touch or feel a product before they purchase online. Indeed, product returns in Internet retailing have been shown to be, on average, as high as 22% of sales. This leads to much higher rates of customer returns in the online channel, which in turn leads to significant costs to retailers. In this paper, it is considered that the online retailer offers a money-back guarantee, which allows customers to return product that do not meet their expectations to the retailer for a full refund. Two benchmark models of a one-manufacturer-one-online retailer supply chain are established with asymmetric information and full information, respectively.The main work in this paper includes four parts. At first, optimal contracts are proposed and the optimal sales promotion strategies and contract design under full information and asymmetric information are analyzed, respectively. Second, on this basis, the effects of the product returns on the equilibriums are analyzed, and consequently the optimal pricing, promotion and contract design of supply chain members under different types of promotion cost are compared. Third, the optimal decisions of both the manufacturer and online retailer, and the changing of consumer surplus under full and asymmetric information are compared. And the effect of different types of promotion cost and asymmetric information on willingness to share information and negotiation behaviors is presented. Finally, to address the value of money-back guarantee, the optimal decisions of both the manufacturer and online retailer, and the changing of profit of supply chain members and consumer surplus under before and after offers a money-back guarantee are compared.The results show that, the contracting scheme, composed of a wholesale price and a fixed payment, can coordinate the supply chain perfectly under symmetric information. By solving the optimization problem, the optimal pricing, promotion and contract design for supply chain members are presented under asymmetric information, respectively. Further, it is found that the manufacture could optimize the contract under asymmetric information by balancing the trade-off between the loss of the supply chain's profit and the information rent. And the online retailer may have an incentive to reveal the private information voluntarily and share the supply chain's profit with manufacture under certain condition. The money-back guarantees strategy make a loss of the manufacturer's expected profit, but may not decrease the online retailer's expected profit and the consumer surplus.In summary, the value of money-back guarantees under asymmetric information is investigated. Moreover, the contracting mechanisms are used to coordinating the online retail supply chain under asymmetric information, which offers a practical and a theoretical guidance to improve the value of online retail supply chain.