Pricing and production decisions in a closed-loop supply chain considering strategic consumers and technology licensing

This paper considers a closed-loop supply chain consisting of a manufacturer and a third party in which the manufacturer licenses the third party to undertake remanufacturing activities in the presence of strategic consumers. We analyse the impacts of strategic consumer behaviour and the third-party remanufacturing cost on three kinds of remanufacturing scenarios, namely no-remanufacturing, partial-remanufacturing and full-remanufacturing. We adopt a Stackelberg game to obtain the equilibrium strategies of each remanufacturing model and show that the demand of new products decreases and the demand of remanufactured products increases as consumers become more strategic. Considering the manufacturer’s profit decrease due to strategic consumer behaviour, the manufacturer suffers a smaller profit loss when he licenses the third party to remanufacture because he can charge a higher licensing fee from the third party to share remanufacturing revenues. Moreover, the manufacturer prefers the third-party remanufacturing mode rather than the manufacturer–remanufacturing mode if the third-party remanufacturing cost is relatively low and remanufacturing can always bring a profit increase to both the manufacturer and the third party.