Pricing and sales-effort analysis of dual-channel supply chain with channel preference, cross-channel return and free riding behavior based on revenue-sharing contract

This study develops a dual-channel supply chain model composed of a retailer with capital constraints and a supplier with sufficient funds, in which the retailer can apply the trade credit financing (TCF) from the supplier. First of all, this work introduces inconsistent pricing strategy, and investigates the optimal pricing, sales-effort level decisions and profits of the dual-channel members. Then it investigates the impacts of consumer channel preference, free-riding behavior (FRB), TCF interest rate, cross-channel return (CCR) and unit contribution to the supplier of the CCR products on the optimal sales-effort level, optimal pricing decisions and the profits of each member under the decentralized and centralized decisions, respectively. To reduce the conflict between the two channels, this research proposes a supplier-revenue sharing contract to coordinate the members so as to achieve the win-win performance with the global optimal supply chain profit. Furthermore, this study uses numerical analysis to test the feasibility of the model and conduct sensitivity analysis. The further results are concluded as follows. (1) Supplier's revenue-sharing contract can well coordinate the dual-channel supply chain with TCF, and achieve the win-win performance with the inconsistent pricing strategy. (2) Under the centralized decision, the overall supply chain profit will have a significant increase with a higher offline-channel preference proportion. (3) The growth of the free-riding coefficient will reduce the overall supply chain profit under both decentralized and centralized decisions when consumers prefer the offline channel, but will increase the centralized overall profit when consumer prefer the online channel. (4) Under the decentralized decision, the online channel's profit will go up and the offline channel's profit will go down when the TCF interest rate increase. (5) Under the decentralized decision, the overall supply chain profit can achieve the maximum by setting a lower unit contribution to the supplier of the CCR products if consumers prefer CCR service. Finally, this work indicates some managerial implications, and proposes some issues for future research.