OPTIMAL RETURN AND REBATE MECHANISM BASED ON DEMAND SENSITIVITY TO REFERENCE PRICE

The acceleration of electronic products’ upgrade affects consumers’ purchase behaviour. How to encourage consumers to return old products in order to upgrade to new products and how to optimize such the closed-loop supply chain are important managerial topics. According to the theory of reference price, the closed-loop supply chain model with fixed rebate and variable rebate is established. The analysis results imply that, when consumers’ willingness to return second-hand products depends on manufacturers’ rebates and prices of new products, the profit of closed-loop supply chain decreases. In addition, when consumers are sensitive to price difference, enterprises can adopt low profit margin methods to increase new product demand. Furthermore, the profit of the manufacturer is closely related to whether consumers are loss-seeking or loss-averse. Finally, our analysis provides the insights of the relationship between the optimal return and rebate mechanism and the use time of the previous generation of products.