Preselling strategies have been a common marketing tool, but research on this selection is limited. Thus, we examine three pre-sale strategies of a manufacturer who produces and sells a seasonal product to a retailer: (1) supplier pre-sale strategy—the supplier carries out preselling by opening a direct channel; (2) retailer pre-sale strategy—the retailer purchases pre-sale products from the supplier and sells them in online and offline channels; and (3) joint pre-sale strategy—the retailer acts as a pre-sale platform, providing order information and pre-sale services. For each preselling mode, we construct the Stackelberg game model aiming to maximize profits and obtain optimal service levels and pricing decisions. We find that the two latter scenarios, that is, to cooperate with the retailer (retailer pre-sale and joint pre-sale strategies), could highly gain more profit for the supplier compared with the former. For the supplier, the joint pre-sale strategy will likely be the dominant strategy because of its wide-range applicability. On the contrary, the retailer is swaying between retailer pre-sale and joint pre-sale strategies under different conditions. For the supplier, leadership always guarantees a high profit, but if the joint pre-sale strategy is adopted, then the existence of a profit-sharing ratio will narrow the profit gap between the two players.

With the advent of the era of “New Retail”, many manufacturers and retailers have begun to provide cross-channel return services to increase competitiveness. Our study takes return policy into a green dual-channel supply chain, wherein a manufacturer creates and sells green products simultaneously. We investigate the pricing and greening strategies for the supply chain players in the cases of providing and not providing cross-channel return service by employing the Stackelberg model under the hypothesis of a consistent pricing strategy. By comparing the equilibrium results of two cases, we find that the retailer will cooperate with the manufacturer to employ the cross-channel return policy when the spillover effect is greater than a threshold. Additionally, the green level of products is higher than before. The threshold decreases with consumers’ sensitivity to green products, which implies that the manufacturer is motivated to conduct marketing programs to enhance consumers’ willingness to buy green products. Moreover, we propose a contract to coordinate the supply chain. Finally, we discuss the scenarios if the supply chain implements a differential pricing strategy. Interestingly, the green level and the profits of the whole supply chain are greater than that under a consistent pricing strategy. However, the profits of the retailer are lower than profits in the other scenario, which is not beneficial to creating a stable green supply chain.

In this paper, a new method for improving smooth degree of original data sequence based on function transformation x x ln − is put forward. It is proved that the new method can advance the smooth degree of original data sequence much better and can improve the precision of GM(1,1) model. The new method can widen the application range of grey model. The practical application shows the effectiveness of the proposing approach.

No abstract