Vertical Channel Conflict Coordination Strategy of e-Commerce Supply Chain under Platform Brand Empowerment

We develop a game model for a supply chain consisting of one e-commerce platform, one supplier from other channels, and one retailer. The platform has a well-known brand that can influence consumers’ purchase decisions, and it provides good-quality products with high prices, while supplier from other channels provides cheaper products but possibly with low quality, and there may even be some serious quality problems, sometimes leading to serious problems such as “free-riding” behavior by the retailer and reducing the profits of the supply chain members. First, we study the decisions of platform and retailer under centralized decision (CD) scenario, decentralized decision (DD) scenario, cost sharing contract (CS) scenario, and minimum order quantity contract (QC) scenario. Second, we found that channel conflicts have a negative impact on supply chain members under DD scenario; however, CS and QC scenarios can make the optimal empowerment level of platform the same as CD scenario and encourage retailer to order more products from platform. Finally, the improvement effect in QC and CS scenarios is affected by the substitutability of the two products, the coefficient of empowerment cost, and the reaction coefficient of product price on goodwill. Furthermore, we found that under QC scenario, only within an appropriate range can the platform and the retailer achieve a win-win situation.