Wholesale pricing and evolutionarily stable strategies of retailers with imperfectly observable objective

This paper develops a one-population (indirect) evolutionary game model of a supply chain with one manufacturer/supplier and many (a sufficiently large number of) retailers to study how the retailer’s marketing objective depends on the wholesale price, its observability, the error probability of the observed result on the rival’s preference, the market scale and the retailer’s bargaining power. This paper also presents an algorithm for computing the optimal wholesale price of the manufacturer. We find that the profit (revenue) maximization behavior is an evolutionarily stable marketing strategy if the wholesale price is sufficiently high (low). Given an appropriate wholesale price, the revenue maximization behavior coexists with the profit maximization behavior in the retailers’ population. The larger the market scale, the stronger the motivation of the retailer to take profit maximization behavior due to a higher wholesale price. The cross effects of the retailer’s reservation payoff and the other factors should be considered in the decision process.