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

摘要： :随着零售业的快速发展,零售商的话语权不断提升,有越来越多的零售商开始成为供应链的主导者。在零售业中,零售商在批发零售的同时又为第三方卖家提供零售平台已经成为了一种主流的商业模式。此外,一些零售商开始向第三方卖家共享其自建物流服务。本文研究了在零售商主导的供应链中零售商的物流服务共享(简称LSS)对于供应商、第三方卖家、整个供应链以及消费者的影响。本文构建了一个包含供应商、零售商和第三方卖家的博弈模型,研究结果表明:(1)LSS总是对第三方卖家的价格、需求和利润产生积极影响。(2)跨渠道服务敏感性较小时,LSS能够实现供应商、第三方卖家和零售商三方共赢。(3)当零售商的物流服务水平并不比第三方物流服务水平高太多时,LSS可以提升供应链总利润;跨渠道服务敏感性中等时,LSS可以提升消费者效用。

关键词: 零售商主导, 供应链, 物流服务共享, 博弈论