Consumers' reference price effects (RPE) impact market pricing transactions and play a vital role in enterprise pricing decisions. Meanwhile, due to consumers' widespread concern about environmental and ecological issues, more enterprises are taking part in the activity of corporate social responsibility (CSR). Motivated by CSR practices, we examine social work donations (SWD) as a CSR activity. Given practical complexities, we used the profit maximization principle and game theory to focus on a two-echelon supply chain consisting of one manufacturer and one retailer taking part in CSR activity under RPE, where the manufacturer takes part in SWD as CSR practice and collects used products from customers. Five models are developed to investigate the influence of reference price and CSR on remanufacturing supply chain decisions; in specific, the high parameter of reference price benefits the supply chain members' profits, but too high of investment efforts in CSR might hurt the supply chain members. In addition, under the decentralized system, giving appropriate government subsidies can reduce profit losses when RPE exists. Finally, we propose a two-part tariff (TPT) contract to coordinate the decentralized CSR remanufacturing supply chain. Our research can be directly applied to remanufacturing supply chains under RPE in CSR environments.

With the shortage of global resources and the call for sustainable development, the remanufacturing supply chain and the corporate social responsibility of enterprises have attracted extensive attention from scholars. This paper studies a manufacturer-retailer corporate social responsibility (CSR) remanufacturing supply chain in which the manufacturer collects the used products grounded in the willingness to pay (WTP) differentiation. Different from previous literature, this paper first adds WTP differences to the CSR remanufacturing supply chain. Next, we analyze the manufacturer exhibiting CSR activity by Stackelberg game theory in both centralized and decentralized models with a consideration of prices, recycling, consumer surplus, and profits for the chain players in the two models with different CSR ratios. Through calculation and analyses of the models, we note that the chain members have the best status when the consumers’ WTP for new and remanufactured products is within a threshold. Subsequently, we compare the optimal price decisions and the expected profits in the decentralized and centralized systems, and we find that the retail price, wholesale price, and recycling rate decrease with a rising CSR under WTP differentiation. The centralized retail price is lower than the decentralized one. Conversely, the profit is higher when the increment of demand is higher. On top of that, in common cases, the pure and total profits of manufacturing are ascending while the retailer’s profit is descending. We also find that the consumer surplus is increasing in two cases. Finally, to motivate the players in the supply chain to engage in CSR activity, we consider the revenue sharing contract. From the perspective of WTP differences, this paper studies CSR remanufacturing, which has certain influences on the sustainable development of the economy.

This paper studies production-and-order strategies under three production systems in which the supplier’s production quantity is constrained by the upfront preparations of capacity due to a long production season. The newsvendor-like retailer may make an advance order at the beginning of the production season, relying on early demand information, or a delay order at the end of the production season, depending on the updated demand information. In two special cases of perfect and imperfect demand information updates, this paper analytically derives the optimal decision equilibrium of a supplier-led Stackelberg game for three production-and-order strategies: (1) advance order under single regular production, (2) delay order under single emergency production and (3) delay order under two-mode production. In the case of perfect information updates, all three strategies likely become the equilibrium strategies that depend on the instant wholesale price and on the production cost for emergency production. In the case of imperfect information updates, the strategy of advance orders under regular production represents the unique equilibrium of the supply chain. Furthermore, the effect of general demand information updates on the equilibrium strategy is analyzed. Counterintuitively, the research results show that the retailer is more profitable with imperfect information updates than with perfect information updates when a high instant wholesale price is charged. In sharp contrast to previous studies, where the supplier always benefits from a two-mode production system due to its flexibility, our results indicate that the supplier would prefer a single regular production system when the production cost under emergency production is large, or the quality of demand information is high. Numerical examples verify our theoretical results.