With the boom of e-commerce, express delivery has been increasingly regarded as a bottleneck and key factor for achieving success. Additionally, whether to include such express delivery service or not is an important yet outstandingly unsolved problem for online retailers. In this regard, this...

We begin with a supplier (she) who wholesales to a retailer (he), and is considering to encroach into the retail market by opening an independent online/offline store to sell directly to consumers (a direct channel encroachment) or by selling directly to consumers through the online platform of...

We study a two-period supply chain in which a manufacturer produces a product, learns to reduce cost, and sells it through a retailer with a price-dependent demand. The manufacturer's second-period production cost declines linearly in the first-period production with a random learning rate. The...

This study investigates the strategic effect of return policies in a dual-channel supply chain, in which a manufacturer can sell products directly to end customers and indirectly via an independent retailer. The manufacturer decides whether to implement a return policy in either the direct or...

Channel sharing is an important marketing strategy for giant retailers who sell their own store brands and resell national brands for cooperative manufacturers simultaneously. To expand their market and increase profitability, national brand manufacturers may consider entering the online market...

The presentation of Table 2 in the original version of this article (quot;A Survey of Stackelberg Differential Game Models in Supply and Marketing Channelsquot;, Journal of Systems Science and Systems Engineering, Vol. 16, No. 4, pp., 385-413, 2007) contained a few typos. The corrected Table 2...

The term platform economy refers to a business practice in which online retailers serve as transaction platforms that connect upstream suppliers with downstream buyers. Each transaction platform has a traditional retail channel where a supplier can sell products indirectly to customers. In...