INFORMATION STRUCTURES AND PRICING DECISIONS IN COMPETING SUPPLY CHAINS

The paper investigates the pricing decisions of two competing supply chains under the different information structures. Each retailer has private information about the market demand and has the right to decide whether or not to share the information with the manufacturer. Three demand-information structures, i.e., information sharing in both supply chains, information sharing in only one supply chain and information sharing in neither supply chain, are considered. We investigate the value of information by comparing the information structures, and find that the information value not only works in the channel directly, but also does in the competing channel indirectly. Information sharing in a supply chain always benefits its manufacturer, but hurts its retailer; while it benefits both the manufacturer and the retailer of competing supply chain, regardless of whether this competing supply chain has information sharing. From the perspective of channel, when t^e competition is more intense, information sharing in a supply chain makes this supply chain better off, and when the competition is less intense, the information sharing in a supply chain makes this supply chain worse off. However, it always makes the competing supply chain better off regardless of whether the competing supply chain has information sharing.

The Optimal Order and Production Strategies of Supply Chain with a Stochastic Demand under Carbon Cap-and-Trade Mechanism

In the context of the global low-carbon economy,the carbon cap-and-trade mechanism(CCATM)plays an important impact on the production and trade of enterprises and is widely implemented by most governments to reduce carbon emissions.In this paper,we investigate a two-stage supply chain game model with a stochastic demand under the CCATM,in which the manufacturer has two production modes and the retailer has two order opportunities,and both of them make green effort.The results show that the optimal decision is irrelevant to carbon cap while is relevant to carbon emissions per unit product.The profits of both the manufacturer and the retailer increase under the CCATM.Furthermore,we explore the optimal decisions under the buyback contract and the payment contract provided by the manufacturer to the retailer.We find that the transfer payment can't improve the profit while the buyback contract can do.We further extend our model by investigating the scenario with the risk-averse channel members,and find that the first optimal order quantity of the retailer would reduce due to risk aversion,while the manufacturer would invest more green effort and the manufacturer would be more likely to cooperate with alowerrisk-averse retailer.

Polyphenol-based hydrogels: Pyramid evolution from crosslinked structures to biomedical applications and the reverse design

As a kind of nature-derived bioactive materials, polyphenol-based hydrogels possess many unique and outstanding properties such as adhesion, toughness, and self-healing due to their specific crosslinking structures, which have been widely used in biomedical fields including wound healing, antitumor, treatment of motor system injury, digestive system disease, oculopathy, and bioelectronics. In this review, starting with the classi-fication of common polyphenol-based hydrogels, the pyramid evolution process of polyphenol-based hydrogels from crosslinking structures to derived properties and then to biomedical applications is elaborated, as well as the efficient reverse design considerations of polyphenol-based hydrogel systems are proposed. Finally, the existing problems and development prospects of these hydrogel materials are discussed. It is hoped that the unique perspective of the review can promote further innovation and breakthroughs of polyphenol-based hydrogels in the future.