چكيده به لاتين
The market for fresh food products has been expanding for years and became an important part of economic development. Short lifetime product retailers often face the challenge of cannibalization between new and old products, which can negatively impact their profitability. They attempt to influence consumers’ choices through price differentiation, resulting in internal competition regarding products’ age and price. The pricing decisions affect market demand, sales volume, and as a result, the whole supply chain (SC) profit. However, in the decentralized decision-making, the SC members optimize their personal decisions while ignoring the whole SC. Therefore, the decentralized structure may not be a proper decision-making method. In the centralized decision-making approach, all decision variables are optimized from the whole SC viewpoint, but it may reduce the SC members’ profit. Therefore, a coordination mechanism such as contract should be used to encourage the SC members to join in the centralized structure.
The focus of this thesis is to coordinate inventory replenishment and pricing decisions in a short lifetime product supply chain (SLPSC), considering the cannibalization effect. In particular, we study four problem versions in which different assumptions such as segmented market, discount-oriented consumers, promotional efforts, and demand scenarios are considered. Firstly, the optimal decisions of the SLPSC members are obtained under decentralized and centralized decision-making structures. Then, a coordination contract is designed to motivate the SC members to shift from the decentralized structure to the centralized one. An analytical method is used to solve the mathematical models. To analyze the performance of the proposed approaches in practice, some numerical examples and also a data set from Pegah-Arak Company have been used. The findings indicate that the coordinated model creates more economic profitability for the whole SLPSC than the decentralized one. Furthermore, the proposed contract is more beneficial for the SLPSC from an environmental viewpoint, as it decreases returned products and waste.
