The Impact of Consumers’ Peer-Induced Fairness Concerns on Mixed Retail and E-Tail Channels

With the rapid development of e-commerce, online retailing has become an important part of the market. In order to improve market competitiveness and increase market share, more and more retailers have opened both regular offline channel and online e-tail channel to sell products. Then how to price becomes an urgent problem for upstream manufacturers and dual-channel retailers when there is price competition between regular channel and e-tail channel, especially when consumers have peer-induced fairness concerns. However, linking consumers’ behavioral factors such as fairness concerns to pricing decisions of mixed retail and e-tail channels draws little attention in the literature on supply chain management. This paper incorporates “consumers’ peer-induced fairness concerns” (CPFC) into pricing decisions in a dyadic supply chain, where dual-channel retailer obtains products from manufacturers and then sells products to consumers through both regular channel and e-tail channel. We use game-theoretic models to analyze the equilibrium pricing strategies under the setting with “symmetry consumers’ peer-induced fairness concerns” (SCPFC) and with “asymmetry consumers’ peer-induced fairness concerns” (ACPFC), respectively. Detailed comparisons and numerical analysis are further conducted to examine the impacts of different types of CPFC on equilibrium pricing strategies and profits.