Pricing and recovery in a dual-channel closed-loop supply chain under uncertain environment

This paper studies the pricing and recovery strategies in a closed-loop supply chain that is composed of a manufacturer, a retailer and a third-party recycling center. The manufacturer sells products through the online channel and the traditional retail channel. In the reverse recycling channel, the used products are collected for remanufacturing through the manufacturer channel or the third-party channel. However, the product update speed for products such as mobile phone and software industries is accelerated, and the manufacturing sales costs, retailer sales costs, collecting costs, consumer demands and the quantities of recycled products are usually uncertain due to the lack or insufficiency of historical data. Considering the effective different recycling channels, two Stackelberg game models led by the manufacturer are developed to analyze the difference between the manufacturer and the third-party recycling channel. We also discussed the optimal decision and maximum expected profit under the centralized decision model. Some corresponding analytical solutions are derived to solve the models. Finally, numerical experiments are conducted to examine the impact on customer acceptance of the online channel on pricing decisions. To examine the effects of key uncertain parameters on the optimal decisions, we perform sensitivity analysis on some important parameters.