Research on closed loop supply chain with reference price effect

This paper considers a closed loop supply chain with the manufacturer as the Stackelberg leader. The manufacturer faces three different reverse channels, i.e., (1) manufacturer-managed, (2) retailer-managed, or (3) third party-managed channels. The reference price affects the purchase decision of consumers. Based on game theory, we discuss the reference price effect on the performances across three decentralized reverse channels, and examine the impact of reference price parameter (i.e., reference price coefficient in this paper) on optimal strategies. We conclude that higher reference price coefficient results in lower manufacturer and retailer profits. However, the profit of the third party increases in the reference price coefficient. In addition, some meaningful insights can be derived by comparison without the reference price effect in our models. We found that the scenario without reference price effect is generally superior to that with reference price effect.