Research on Alliance Decision of Dual-Channel Remanufacturing Supply Chain Considering Bidirectional Free-Riding and Cost-Sharing

This study delves into the formation dynamics of alliances within a closed-loop supply chain(CLSC)that encom-passes a manufacturer,a retailer,and an e-commerce platform.It leverages Stackelberg game for this exploration,contrasting the equilibrium outcomes of a non-alliance model with those of three differentiated alliance models.The non-alliance model acts as a crucial benchmark,enabling the evaluation of the motivations for various supply chain entities to engage in alliance formations.Our analysis is centered on identifying the most effective alliance strategies and establishing a coordination within these partnerships.We thoroughly investigate the consequences of diverse alliance behaviors,bidirectional free-riding and cost-sharing,and the resultant effects on the optimal decision-making among supply chain actors.The findings underscore several pivotal insights:(1)The behavior of alliances within the supply chain exerts variable impacts on the optimal pricing and demand of its members.In comparison to the non-alliance(D)model,the manufacturer-retailer(MR)and manufacturer-e-commerce platform(ME)alliances significantly lower both offline and online resale prices for new and remanufactured goods.This adjustment leads to an enhanced demand for products via the MR alliance’s offline outlets and the ME alliance’s online platforms,thereby augmenting the profits for those within the alliance.Conversely,retailer-e-commerce platform(ER)alliance tends to increase the optimal retail price and demand across both online and offline channels.Under specific conditions,alliance behavior can also increase the profits of non-alliance members,and the profits derived through alliance channels also exceed those from non-alliance channels.(2)The prevalence of bidirectional free-riding behavior largely remains constant across different alliance configurations.Across these models,bidirectional free-riding typically elevates the equilibrium prices in offline channel while negatively affecting the equilibrium prices in other channel.(3)The effect of cost-sharing shows relative uniformity across the various alliance models.Across all configurations,cost-sharing tends to reduce the manufacturer’s profits.Nonetheless,alliances initiated by the manufacturer can counteract these negative impacts,providing a strategic pathway to bolster CLSC profitability.

Free-riders Impact on Throughputs of Peer-to-peer File-sharing Systems

In a peer-to-peer file-sharing system, a free-rider is a node which downloads files from its peers but does not share files to other nodes. Analyzing the free-riders’ impact on system throughputs is essential in examining the performance of peer-to-peer file-sharing systems. We find that the free-riders’ impact largely depends on nodes behavior, including their online time and greed of downloading files. We extend an existing peer-to-peer system model and classify nodes according to their behavior. We focus on two peer-to-peer architectures: centralized indexing and distributed hash tables. We find that when the cooperators in a system are all greedy in downloading files, the system throughput has little room to increase while the cooperators throughput degrade badly with the increasing percent of greedy free-riders in the system. When all the cooperators are non-greedy with long average online time, the system throughput has much room to increase and the cooperators throughput degrade little with a high percent of greedy free-riders in the system. We also find that if a system can tolerate a high percent of greedy free-riders without suffering much throughput degradation, the system must contain some non-greedy cooperators that contribute great idle service capacity to the system.

A Credit-Based Approach for Overcoming Free-Riding Behaviour in Peer-to-Peer Networks

The underlying premise of peer-to-peer(P2P)systems is the trading of digital resources among individual peers to facilitate file sharing,distributed computing,storage,collaborative applications and multimedia streaming.So-called free-riders challenge the foundations of this system by consuming resources from other peers without offering any resources in return,hindering resource exchange among peers.Therefore,immense effort has been invested in discouraging free-riding and overcoming the ill effects of such unfair use of the system.However,previous efforts have all fallen short of effectively addressing free-riding behaviour in P2P networks.This paper proposes a novel approach based on utilising a credit incentive for P2P networks,wherein a grace period is introduced during which free-riders must reimburse resources.In contrast to previous approaches,the proposed system takes into consideration the upload rate of peers and a grace period.The system has been thoroughly tested in a simulated environment,and the results show that the proposed approach effectively mitigates free-riding behaviour.Compared to previous systems,the number of downloads from free-riders decreased while downloads by contributing peers increased.The results also show that under longer grace periods,the number of downloads by fast peers(those reimbursing the system within the grace period)was greater than the number of downloads by slow peers.

A Motivate Mechanism for Large-Scale P2P Content Delivery System

For lack of effective resource adjustment method, the supply-demand relationship of each resource in P2P content delivery system are often unbalanced. Especially after a popular content releasing, a burst of downloaders often can＇t find sufficient uploaders and their request may starve the upload capacity of server. Therefore the overall system QoS may be degraded. To tackle such issue, this paper proposes a download rate accelerate mechanism, called motivate mechanism. With it, the system can quickly find out the files becoming insufficient by monitoring the operating status of the files hourly, Then it promptly increase the number of copies of those files by using free rider nodes so that the whole system QoS is maintained and the system performance is improved. The experiment results on the practical operating system of Tencent demonstrated that the proposed mechanism increases the download rate, saves the traffic on the server and optimizes the system performance.

A GAME THEORETICAL STUDY OF COOPERATIVE ADVERTISING WITH MULTIPLE RETAILERS IN A DISTRIBUTION CHANNEL

Extant studies of cooperative advertising mainly consider a single-manufacturer-single-retailer channel structure. This can provide limited insights, because a manufacturer, in real practices, usually deals with multiple retailers simultaneously. In order to examine the impact of the retailer＇s multiplicity on channel members＇ decisions and on total channel efficiencies, this paper develops a multiple-retailer model. In this model, the manufacturer and the retailers play a Stackelberg game to make the optimal advertising decisions. Based on the quantitative results, it is observed that： 1） When there are multiple symmetric retailers, as the number of retailers scales up, the manufacturer＇s national advertising investment contributes increasingly to add to channel members＇ profits in equilibrium, but the total channel efficiency deteriorates quickly and converges down to a certain value; 2） When there are multiple asymmetric retailers, the distribution channel suffers from the manufacturer＇s uniform participation strategy due to the retailer＇s free-riding, and benefits with the manufacturer＇s retailer-specific participation strategy. This study derives equilibrium solutions in closed form for all games considered and measures explicitly the gains/losses of channel efficiencies under different game settings.

Improving Performance of LDPC-Coded Links via Partial Superposition Retransmission

In this paper,we propose a transmission scheme for uplink and downlink transmissions,where the fifth generation(5G)low-density parity-check(LDPC)codes are implemented for error correction.In the proposed scheme,the acknowledgment(ACK)or negative acknowledgment(NACK)feedback information is transmitted along with the payload data by cyclically shifting coded sequence,while the re-transmitted codewords are superimposed(XORed)partially on the current codewords.The distinguished feature of the proposed transmission scheme is that it requires neither extra transmission bandwidth nor extra transmission power.We also propose to truncate the error patterns for the purpose of reducing the implementation complexity and reducing the error propagation.Numerical results show that the proposed scheme significantly outperforms conventional LDPC-coded transmission.For the 5G LDPC code with length 1920 at the signal-to-noise ratio(SNR)of 1.3 dB,the word error rate(WER)of the data transmitted by the proposed scheme is about 10^(−4),while that of the conventional LDPC-coded transmission is about 10^(−2).