关键词: 零售商主导, 供应链, 物流服务共享, 博弈论

Abstract: With the rapid development of the retail industry, the retailer’s power has increased. More and more retailers have become dominant in the supply chain. In the retail industry, it has become a mainstream business model for retailers (like Amazon and JD.com) to not only resell products but also provide retail platform for the third-party sellers, fundamentally altering traditional supply chain relationships. Besides, the retailer has provided its self-built logistics service for the third-party sellers. The paper is motivated by the retailer’s logistics service sharing in practice. Our work studies the impacts of the retailer’s logistics service sharing on the common supplier, the retailer, the third-party seller, the total supply chain, and consumers in the retailer-led supply chain. This paper may be the first theoretical study on exploring the retailer’s logistics service sharing in the retailer-led supply chain and further explores the impact from various stakeholders’ perspectives, offering new insights into the dynamics of logistics service sharing.
   In this study, a game-theoretic model involving a common supplier, a retailer, and a third-party seller is developed to investigate the impacts of the retailer’s logistics service sharing. Each participant, aiming to maximize their profits, engages in strategic decision-making within the model. We first analyze the optimal pricing decisions of the supplier, retailer, and third-party seller without and with the logistics service sharing and then investigate the impacts of retailer’s logistics service sharing by comparing the game equilibria of the two cases.
   Our results indicate that the retailer’s logistics service sharing always has positive effects on the price, demand and profit of the third-party seller due to the increased logistics service level. Moreover, when the cross-service sensitivity is small, indicating that consumers are not highly sensitive to differences in logistics service quality, the logistics service sharing can lead to a “win-win-win” outcome for the retailer, the supplier, and the third-party seller. This is because the logistics service sharing can mitigate the price competition between the retailer and the third-party seller. When the service level of the retailer’s self-established logistics is not very higher than that of the third-party logistics, the logistics service sharing can improve the total profit of the supply chain. Additionally, when the cross-service sensitivity is medium, the retailer’s logistics service sharing can improve consumer surplus because the logistics service sharing enhances the service level and may result in lower retail prices. Our findings provide insights into when the retailer’s logistics service sharing is more likely to be beneficial and when it can be harmful in the retailer-led supply chain. These insights are useful for understanding the impacts of the logistics service sharing on the retailer, the supplier, the third-party seller, the supply chain, and consumers.
   There are several directions for future research. In this work, we only consider the complete information among the retailer, the common supplier, and the third-party seller. However, the retailer may have more detailed demand information than suppliers and the third-party sellers due to its rich first-hand sales data, expertise and superior forecasting ability in the selling process. Incorporating information asymmetry into the retailer’s logistics service sharing problem may be a fruitful area of research. Besides, this paper does not consider the downstream competition between retailers. In practice, retailers often engage in competition with one another. Therefore, an interesting direction for future research is to explore how the retailer’s logistics service sharing strategy might be influenced by downstream competition.

Key words: retailer-led, supply chain, logistics service sharing, game theory