This article investigates the impact of intercompetitor licensing between an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) and an independent remanufacturer (IR) on market competition between new and remanufactured products, the IR's remanufacturing strategy, and the IR's optimal quality choice for remanufactured products. In the considered supply chain, the OEM sells new products, and the IR collects used products and then sells remanufactured products to compete with the OEM. To produce remanufactured products, the IR can acquire remanufacturing technology either by paying a licensing fee to the OEM or self-developing it in-house by incurring a fixed research and development cost. We develop game-theoretic models to determine the optimal supply chain decisions concerning the royalty licensing fee, IR's remanufacturing strategy and production quality, and product sale prices. We find that a licensing contract will always induce the OEM and the IR to increase their sales price for new and remanufactured products. However, the OEM will always increase the sales price for new products to a larger degree than that of the IR. This can alleviate price competition between new and remanufactured products and make remanufactured products more competitive in the market. Under licensing cooperation, the IR will always remanufacture used products to a higher quality level that will intensify quality competition. No matter whether the royalty fee is exogenously or endogenously determined by the OEM, there exists a wide range of parameter regions such that a licensing contract will produce a win-win solution for the OEM and the IR. A licensing cooperation may be reached even when the unit royalty fee is at a relatively low level and the total royalty fee is higher than the self-development option.

This article considers supply chain competition in which two symmetric manufacturers compete in both the new and remanufactured products markets. To engage in remanufacturing, the two competing manufacturers must appropriately determine their remanufacturing capability and design new products to facilitate their competition in remanufacturing. This inevitably changes the competing manufacturers’ cost structure in terms of both fixed and variable costs. The problem is formulated as a two-stage game. Therein, the competing manufacturers first determine whether to invest in remanufacturing, followed by determining the production quantities of new and remanufactured products if they decide to invest in remanufacturing. Our analytical results reveal that the equilibria associated with the three scenarios in which both manufacturers invest, neither manufacturer invests, and either manufacturer invests can be conditionally achieved, depending on the fixed cost incurred in developing remanufacturing capability and the difference between marginal costs associated with new and remanufactured products. Furthermore, it is found that despite the cost structure changes, remanufacturing investment can expand the two competing manufacturers’ market shares and outweigh the cannibalization effect between new and remanufactured products, resulting in higher profits. Nevertheless, the competing manufacturers may be trapped in a prisoner's dilemma when they both invest in remanufacturing operations. By comparing the environmental impact with and without remanufacturing investment, the result suggests that remanufacturing investment may not be environmental friendly, especially when the cost difference between new and remanufactured products is significant. Finally, the subsidy policy is proven to benefit manufacturers in gaining more profits and promoting the development of the remanufacturing industry, but may cause an unanticipated negative overall outcome on the environment.

In this paper, we study a mobile game supply chain selling a mobile game. We consider two major players in the supply chain: a mobile game developer who develops the mobile game (i.e. supplier) and a mobile game distributor who publishes and sells the mobile game (i.e. retailer). The developer determines its wholesale price and product quality efforts, while the distributor determines its markup and product sale efforts. To this end, we derive the supply chain players’ optimal decisions under a Nash equilibrium. We investigate the impact of effort efficiency on the supply chain player’s optimal pricing and effort decisions. We show that risk aversion may not always lead to conservative supply chain decisions, and risk seeking may not always lead to aggressive decisions. Our analyses indicate that moderate risk-seeking can mitigate double marginalisation in a decentralized supply chain. However, optimal supply chain decisions cannot be made by simply adjusting the supply chain player’s level of risk tolerance.

We study an online game supply chain that is composed of a game developer and a distributor. We investigate the impact of the distributor sharing demand information on the game quality investment during the game development stage and the marketing investment. Our analyses show that information sharing does not always improve marketing investment. When the online game market demand is relatively insensitive to the game price, sharing information motivates the distributor to invest more in marketing. In addition, information sharing always affects the developer's decision in product quality. The developer will be less conservative in product quality when it is more certain about the market demand and commit a higher investment after having demand information shared with it. For the distributor, we find that information sharing only results in a higher markup decision when the market demand is not very sensitive to the game price. There exists a Pareto improvement region so that the distributor will voluntarily share the demand information, which benefits both supply chain members.

This study investigates a budget-constrained retailer's optimal financing and portfolio order policies in a supply chain with option contracts. To this end, we develop two analytical models: a basic model with wholesale price contracts as the benchmark and a model with option contracts. Each model considers both the financing scenario and the no-financing scenario. Our analyses show that the retailer uses wholesale price contracts for procurement, instead of option contracts, when its budget is extremely tight. The retailer starts to use a combination of these two types of contracts when the budget constraint is relieved. As the budget increases, the retailer adjusts the procurement ratio through both types until it can implement the optimal ordering policy with an adequate budget. In addition, the condition for seeking external financing is determined by the retailer's initial budget, financing cost, and profit margin.