Collecting channel choice and optimal decisions on pricing and collecting in a remanufacturing supply chain

This paper considers a remanufacturing supply chain where a manufacturer adopts the dual collecting channels to recycle the used products. In order to analyze the optimal choice of collecting channel, the optimal pricing and collecting effort decisions, we establish two models by considering the collecting channels competition and obtain their corresponding analytical solutions. Through analysis and comparison of the results obtained in this paper and the existing references, some interesting and new insights are derived. For example, (1) the manufacturer's best action for collecting used products is to insure the retailer is engaged in collecting used products regardless of adopting single collecting channel or dual collecting channels; (2) the manufacturer's best choice, in order to improve environmental performance, increase used-product collection quantity, is to adopt dual collecting channels; (3) counter-intuitively, although the intensity of competition between the dual collecting channels affects the new product's optimal wholesale price and optimal retail price, it does not affect the order of the optimal collection effort of the whole supply chain in the models established in this paper and in Savaskan et al. (2004) and Huang et al. (2013).