Strategic Conditions for Opening an Internet Store and Pricing Policies in a Retailer-Dominant Supply Chain

To examine when the manufacturer and dominant retailer open their own Internet stores and how setting prices to ensure opening Internet stores are profitable. We consider a two-echelon supply chain with one manufacturer and one dominant retailer. The retailer has a physical store in a monopolist market. Depending on whether the Internet stores are opened successfully by them, we firstly obtain equilibrium prices and profits under four possible supply chain structures. Secondly, we identify several strategic conditions when it is optimal to open an Internet store for the manufacturer and dominant retailer and discuss its implications. It is interesting to note that multichannel retailing is not necessarily the best strategy for the dominant retailer. In addition, we investigate the impacts of problem parameters (the dominant retailer’s bargaining power and consumers’ disutility of purchasing a product from Internet store) on the manufacturer and dominant retailer’s pricing policies. We find that the manufacturer’s optimal price at her Internet store is not always being lower than the dominant retailer’s. Finally, we conduct numerical examples to illustrate the theoretical results.