Manufacturers produce products with horizontal differences to meet different needs of customers. This paper compares the influence of three different sales channels on strategic customers’ choice and the pricing strategy of products with horizontal differentiation. The results show that the strategic customers whose willingness to pay (WTP) is close to 1 will buy high-performance products and whose WTP is close to 0 will not purchase any kind of products in the two dual-channel models. If the manufacturers adopt dual channel to sell products with horizontal differences, the retailers agree that the manufacturers sell high-performance products in the traditional channel and sell low-performance products in the electronic channel. In dual-channel supply chain model I, the higher the satisfaction of high-performance products and the lower the satisfaction of low-performance products, the more conducive to the retailers.
Capacity planning, as a vital asset, is a challenge problem for firms in various industries, such as organic agriculture, apparels and high-tech industry. However, many manufacturers are conservative about their capacity investment for a variety of reasons. As a result, many retailers have the motivation to stimulate manufacturers to enhance their capacity level. In this paper, we propose a revenue sharing and capacity cost compensation contract to help the retailer stimulate her manufacturer to increase the capacity investment. In the contract, the retailer keeps a portion of sales revenue and compensates for the manufacturer’s capacity cost. They face a stochastic demand and play a Stackelberg game where the retailer acts as a leader and the manufacturer acts as a follower. We demonstrate that the channel can be perfectly coordinated through our proposed contract. Moreover, we give a feasible range of profit distribution, in which both channel members can earn no less profit than that in non-cooperation. Comparing with centralized channel with multiplicative demand, we find that capacity in decentralized channel tends to be lower.
Automated negotiation has played an important role in supporting the dynamic trading based ecommerce. Research in automated negotiation, especially for computer-computer negotiation pays little attention on the implementation related issues such as multi-strategy selection, which will be very useful for the computer-human negotiation. The strategy selection is very important for negotiating agent to achieve better negotiation outcomes. The lack of such study has slowed down the process of applying automated negotiation to real world problems. To address the issue, this paper develops a multi-strategy selection model grounded on the integration of the time-dependent and behavior-dependent tactics, the multi-strategy selection theoretical model and algorithm is proposed to meet the following three goals: supporting multi-strategy selection, easy to be implemented and less resources consuming. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model and algorithm, a prototype of the model is built, and a lot of experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the model.
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