Taking an environment-friendly green closed-loop supply chain as the research object, this work established a two-stage closed-loop supply chain game model. Considering the influence of the environmental protection input on the whole supply chain, there are different decisions among the participants in the supply chain, and the different choices will have impacts on the benefits of the whole supply chain when manufacturers select a closed-loop supply chain model of third-party recycling. Hence, this work compared and analyzed the impact of centralized decision-making and decentralized decision-making on the returns and pricing strategies of each participant. Finally, an optimized cooperative mechanism decision model considering a cost profit sharing contract was further designed. The model is conducive to obtaining the maximum profit value in centralized decision-making and avoids the negative impact of a "double marginal effect" on supply chain income in decentralized decision-making, and finally, improves the overall coordination and profit of a green closed-loop supply chain. The numerical examples are conducted to verify the effectiveness and practicality of the proposed models. This work provides a helpful decision support and guidance for enterprises and the government on the used products recycling decisions to better manage the green closed-loop supply chain. Sustainability 2019, 11, 5335 2 of 14Recellular's revenue in 2005 was $40 million and grew at double-digit rates. Xerox reutilizes and refurbishes the toner warehouse on its photocopying products for free, making the recovery rate reach 60%, which has indirectly expanded the market share and increased the enterprise profit.The green closed-loop supply chain achieves great work results in reducing energy usage, materials consumption, air and water pollution, and so on [6]. Because of its increasing importance, the green closed-loop supply chain has garnered substantial attention from businesses and academia. Studies on green closed-looped supply chains can be mainly classified into the following perspectives: supply chain network design [7,8], production planning and inventory management [9-11], coordination mechanism [12,13], channel management [14,15], and so on. Among them, the green closed-looped supply chain coordination mechanism is one of the most important issues, which has received great attention in both the forward and reverse flows of supply chains. For example, Swami and Shah [16] investigated the channel coordination mechanism between a single manufacturer and retailer in a green closed-loop supply chain. Qiang et al. [17] investigated the competition and coordination of a closed-loop supply chain with two suppliers, two manufacturers, and two retailers, where both new and remanufactured products are launched at the same time. Huang et al.[18] developed a coordination mechanism considering a creative quantity discount contract to cut down customer's false failure returns in a closed-loop supply chain. Although plenty of existing literat...

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PurposeThis paper aims to identify the conditions under which encroachment is a viable strategy for a manufacturer to gain competitive advantage and achieve higher profitability in the presence of the store-brand.Design/methodology/approachThis paper proposes game-theoretic models in a two-echelon supply chain consisting of a manufacturer (him) and a retailer (her), in which he distributes his national brand through the retailer, and endogenously determines whether to establish a new direct sales channel to sell the national brand when the retailer introduces her store-brand.FindingsAnalytical results show that the bar for the manufacturer to encroach the end market in the presence of the store-brand is always higher than that for him to encroach in the absence of the store-brand. Although incurring channel competition, encroaching with the national brand in the presence of the retailer's store-brand can lead to either a win-lose or win-win result for the manufacturer and the retailer. Numerical studies claim that, higher brand substitution can push down the retailer's enthusiasm to introduce her new brand. Counterintuitively, when the retailer introduces her store-brand, higher brand substitution does not necessarily push up the manufacturer's enthusiasm to respond with national-brand encroachment. When consumer preferences for the two brands are heterogeneous, a higher consumer preference for the retailer's store-brand results in the retailer's higher enthusiasm to introduce her store-brand and the manufacturer's lower enthusiasm to encroach with his national brand.Originality/valueThis study can help researchers to better understand the retailer's store-brand introduction, manufacturer encroachment and their interaction theoretically, and further provide decision support for enterprises to choose brand and channel strategies in practice.

The dual-channel supply chain is widely adopted by main manufacturers, potentially incurring channel conflicts between the traditional retail channel which is owned by the independent retailer and the online channel which is directly managed by the manufacturer. The purpose of this paper is to deal with the scenario where channel conflicts may arise under production capacity uncertainty, when the manufacturer tends to privilege the direct selling channel over the retail selling channel. To achieve the goal, this paper establishes a Stackelberg game model consisting of a manufacturer and a retailer, studies the scenario where the manufacturer satisfies the direct selling channel first in the presence of capacity uncertainty, employs the decision optimization and the backward induction method to find the optimal inventory decision in the direct selling channel and the optimal order quantity decision making in the retail selling channel, and designs a compensation mechanism aiming to coordinate the channel conflict in the decentralized decision-making process. Results show that the optimal decisions aiming to maximize the expected profit of each supply chain member are not able to maximize the expected profit of entire dual-channel supply chain. However, when the manufacturer compensates the retailer’s profit loss based on the unsatisfied order and, in the meantime, adjusts the wholesale price to prevent the retailer which obtains the compensation from increasing order significantly, the compensation mechanism can coordinate the decision of each supply chain member, mitigate the channel conflict, maximize the expected profit of entire dual-channel supply chain, and achieve the Pareto improvement of supply chain members’ expected profit in the decentralized decision-making process.

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