Analysis of a Dominant Retailer Dual-Channel Supply Chain under Customers’ Channel Preference: The α-Branch and Bound Solution Algorithm

This paper investigates the Stackelberg equilibrium for pricing and ordering decisions in a dominant retailer dual-channel supply chain. In a dual-channel sales network, the products are sold through both a traditional, physical retailer and a direct Internet channel. It is assumed that the retailer is the leader and the powerful member of the supply chain has the market power and acts as a leader and proposes his/her inventory policies and dollar-markup and the manufacturer, as a follower, will decide on the wholesale price and the price of Internet channel as well as the inventory quantity of online store based on the retailer’s decisions. The situation is formulated as a bi-level programming problem, and it is converted to a single level model using Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions. The single level problem is solved using the α-Branch and Bound (α-BB) algorithm. We investigate the significance of customers’ channel preference on adopting an online channel by the manufacturer. We show that an online channel is not always detrimental to a retailer, but in a Pareto-zone, a range or zone of customers’ channel preference, both supply chain members benefit from newly added sales channel.