题目：Multilateral Bargaining and Return Policies in Distribution Channels

时间：2018-07-09（周一）下午3:00

地点：南校区信远Ⅱ区324

报告人：Dr. Yufei Huang

报告人简介：

Dr. Yufei Huang is an assistant professor at School of Management, University of Bath. He also holds adjunct teaching fellow and honorary research associate position at UCL School of Management. He received a BBA in Marketing, a MS in Physics both from Xi’an Jiaotong University in China, and a PhD in Management from UCL. His research focuses on New Product Development and Launch, Supply Chain Management and Quantitative Marketing. His work has been published in high-quality academic journals, such as Production and Operations Management, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, Industrial Marketing Management and International Journal of Production Research. He teaches Business Analytics, Big Data Analytics, Operations Management, Project Management and Supply Chain Management courses at UCL, and University of Bath.

报告摘要：

Allowing consumer returns via money-back guarantees (MBGs) is a common practice among retailers to encourage consumer purchases. Although the existing literature emphasizes the usefulness of MBGs, little is known about why retailers adopt different return policies and how their bargaining power with the upstream manufacturer impacts their return policies. To gain a better understanding, we examine retailers’ MBG decisions with a stylized model. In our model, two retailers with different quality levels first decide whether to implement MBGs, then simultaneously bargain for wholesale prices with a manufacturer, and finally engage in price competition in the retail market. We adopt a multilateral bargaining framework, and we characterize sufficient conditions and explain the economic rationales for all possible equilibrium MBG outcomes. We further study the impact of the retailers’ bargaining power on the manufacturer’s and retailers’ profits, as well as consumer surplus. We find that the retailers’ (a)symmetric bargaining powers can lead to (a)symmetric MBG decisions and that the retailer with high bargaining power may refuse to implement an MBG if the manufacturer’s reimbursement for the returned product is not large enough. Furthermore, while the manufacturer, the low-quality retailer, and the consumers always benefit from an MBG, the high-quality retailer benefits from an MBG only when his bargaining power is high and the low-quality retailer’s bargaining power is low.