Price and Freshness Competition in RS Fresh Product Supply Chain Structure

This paper focuses on the fresh product supply chain consisting of two competing suppliers and one single retailer. The model accounts for product competition between the two kinds of products provided by two suppliers, as well as for freshness competition between them. We use a game-theoretic model to examine the RS leadership structure. Our results suggest that to be more successful and reap higher profits suppliers should pursue more substitute products with higher freshness and quantity efficient. agricultural fresh products by formulating the plant growing process and the loss process of fresh products in mathematical forms to maximize a level of demand satisfied constantly in every period. Although these studies focused on fresh product supply chain management, no one has yet conducted a study about the competition between the different fresh product suppliers. Therefore, this paper selecting fresh product supply chain as the research object, studies price competition and freshness competition in a channel structure with a common retailer. In the following section, we develop a model that examines price and freshness competition between two substitutable products in a channel structure with two suppliers and one retailer. In the third section, we derive the analytical solutions for the prices, margins, quantities and profits under different channel leadership structures. In the fourth section, we study the main outcomes and discuss the implications of different channel leaderships by conducting some sensitivity analysis and comparing results across different scenarios. Finally, in the last section, we conclude and delineate further research directions.