产品责任视角下零售商主导供应链质量激励策略研究

The research of the quality incentive strategies in a retailer-dominated supply chain from the perspective of product liability

在制造商质量缺陷导致消费者效用损失,并使零售商承受产品责任的情形下,本文考虑了如何设计质量激励策略,以提升制造商产品质量水平。基于此,本文构建以零售商为核心的供应链博弈模型,考虑了事前质量成本分担策略和事后收益分享策略,及相应的零售商决策和纳什讨价还价决策两种模式,研究了供应链运作策略差异,揭示了如何设计更加有效的质量激励策略。研究表明,相对于分散化决策,质量激励策略促进了产品质量和供应链企业及系统业绩的提升,且事前质量成本分担策略比事后收益分享策略的效果要强;在不同决策模式下,零售商决策下的产品质量、市场需求和零售商利润相对较高,而纳什讨价还价决策下的制造商利润和供应链系统利润相对较高。这揭示,较低的产品质量和市场需求导致了相对较高的供应链系统利润;从供应链系统角度看,纳什讨价还价决策下的事前质量成本分担策略是最有效率的。此外,数值分析结果发现,责任成本提高了实施质量成本分担策略的动机,但降低了实施收益分享策略的动机;分担较多的质量成本,并不意味着较高的产品质量和供应链利润;要求供应链下游核心企业承担责任成本,并不会对产品质量和供应链业绩产生积极影响。

Defects are driven by quality and a threat to the safety and utility of consumers. In recent years, consumers and supply chain enterprises have obtained increasing attention in product quality safety. However, product safety events caused by quality defects have still occurred frequently. For example, in 2008, Sanlu suffered a total loss of more than 900 million yuan for recalling tainted milk powder and compensating consumers′ loss, making Sanlu go bankrupt. In 2010, Toyota spent nearly 13.5 billion yuan recalling almost 8 million vehicles due to the suppliers′ accelerator pedals problems. In 2020, GE recalled more than 7 million vehicles worldwide because of the unsafe airbags made by its supplier Takata and undertook a total of 1.2 billion dollars in recall costs. These product quality safety events reveal that the downstream focal enterprises of the supply chains undertook most of the liability costs by the upstream defective products. Therefore, as the first responsible person, a downstream core enterprise in supply chains has a strong incentive to motivate the upstream manufacturer to improve its quality level of products. However, it can be easily found that the upstream manufacturer, as a follower, usually does not have enough capital to invest in the quality improvement activity. On the other hand, although the quality level can be improved by the upstream manufacturer′s quality investment, leading to an increase in the consumers′ market demand, the manufacturer still gains less from the incremental profit than the downstream core enterprise because of its weak position in the bargaining process between supply chain members. Therefore, this study aims to investigate how to design quality incentive strategies to improve the manufacturer′s quality level in the setting where the quality deficiencies of the manufacturer′s products cause harm to the consumers and further lead the retailer to bear product liability. So far, most studies of supply chain management have investigated the issue of using coordination contracts to improve the quality level of products and profitability of the entire supply chain. However, studies on the liability cost caused by the upstream manufacturers′ quality defects that damage the consumers and are undertaken by the downstream retailers are still limited. Meanwhile, few studies have compared the effects of different quality incentive strategies and different decision types of the quality incentive strategy in a downstream retailer-dominated supply chain. Based on this, this study establishes a retailer-dominated supply chain game model with an ex-ante quality cost-sharing contract and an ex-post revenue-sharing contract. Both the cost-sharing rate and the revenue-sharing rate can be decided by the retailer alone or by the manufacturer and the retailer through Nash bargaining. First, given the quality incentive contracts exogenously, this study compares the results of the decentralised model and quality incentive models. It investigates whether the quality incentive strategies benefit the manufacturer′s quality improvement. Second, under the scenarios that the quality incentive contracts are offered by the retailer alone or by the supply chain enterprises through Nash bargaining, this study compares the results of the centralised model, the decentralised model, the quality cost-sharing model, and the revenue-sharing model. It investigates whether the quality incentive strategies can coordinate the supply chain and reveals the optimal quality incentive strategy(contract) and the optimal decision type of the quality incentive strategy(contract) to motivate the improvement of the quality and profitability of the supply chain. Finally, this study discusses the effects of product liability on the equilibrium results through numerical analysis.The equilibrium results show that(1) compared with the decentralisation case, both the quality cost-sharing contract(strategy) and the revenue-sharing contract(strategy) can improve the quality level of the products, the profitability of the supply chain members, and the whole supply chain system effectively. However, the quality cost-sharing contract improves them over the revenue-sharing contract.(2) Further, the quality level of the products, market demand, and retailer′s profit are higher under the retailer-led quality incentive strategies than under the Nash bargaining-led quality incentive strategies. In contrast, the manufacturer′s profit and the supply chain′s overall profit are higher under the Nash bargaining-led quality incentive strategies than under the retailer-led quality incentive strategies. This result reveals that a lower quality level and market demand can result in higher profitability for the total supply chain. Meanwhile, the Nash bargaining-led quality cost-sharing contract is the most effective strategy to improve the supply chain system′s profit. In addition, the numerical analysis results show that(1) the increase of the liability cost raises the supply chain members′ motivations to implement the quality cost-sharing contract. However, it decreases the motivation to implement the revenue-sharing contract.(2) A high quality cost-sharing rate does not mean a high quality level and a high profitability for the supply chain system.(3) An increase in the product liability will not lead to an increase in the quality level and an increase in the profitability of the supply chain members and system.