关键词: 双渠道供应链, 设备故障, 预防性维护, 定价博弈, 耐用设备

Abstract: With the change of business environment and consumption concept, product competition has developed from the traditional price one to the comprehensive one of “product+service”. However, with the continuous expansion of production scale and the rapid upgrading of production technology, enterprises have increased the demand for complex and expensive automation and precision equipment, thus facing more severe challenges in the aspects of after-sales quality assurance service and maintenance optimization of equipment. In the face of expensive equipment purchase cost, maintenance cost, and other adverse factors, some enterprises start to switch from purchasing equipment to leasing equipment, which leads the leasing channel to play an increasingly critical role in the current market. In addition, the operational leasing of durable equipment has become an effective marketing tool and a new profit growth point for the industry. Based on this background and considering the factors such as corrective maintenance and preventive maintenance of durable equipment, this paper studies the product pricing decision under the dual-channel supply chain structure of leasing and sales, and builds the supply chain pricing game model under the single sales model, manufacturer leading model, and cooperation model. The influences of the leasing contract restriction degree and expected number of failures on equilibrium price and profit are analyzed, and the optimal decisions under these three models are compared.
The first part presents the research question, relative assumptions and explanations of symbols used in this paper.
In the second part, the pricing games under the single sales model, manufacturer leading model, and cooperation model are discussed. Our research result shows that when the quality control standard in the production process of durable equipment is reduced or the fault maintenance fee is increased, the manufacturer will reduce the wholesale price to expand the promotion space of retailers in order to offset the risk of demand decline. In order not to losin dual channels, the manufacturer can reduce the number of preventive maintenance or the unit cost of preventive maintenance when considering postponing the initial point of preventive maintenance. By balancing the above three factors, the total maintenance cost of leased equipment will remain unchanged.
In the third part, the optimal decisions in the three game models are compared and analyzed. We find that the total profit of the manufacturer by introducing the leasing channel is always greater than that without introducing the leasing channel. Thus, on the premise of “economic man”, the manufacturer will always choose to introduce the leasing channel. In addition, the equilibrium selling price is affected by the restriction degree of the equipment leasing contract. When the restriction degree of the equipment leasing contract is lower than a certain threshold, the optimal selling price under the cooperation model will be lower than that under the manufacturer leading model, which makes the demand transfer from the leasing channel to the sales channel. Otherwise, the sales price under the cooperation model will be relatively high and thus will damage the consumer surplus of potential users, which will lead to a further loss of the sales market.
In the fourth part, the relationship between the revenue function and some parameters is analyzed. Some propositions in the above sections are verified through numerical simulation experiments.

Key words: dual-channel supply chain, equipment failure, preventive maintenance, pricing game, durable equipment