Xu Chen’s research while affiliated with Guilin University of Electronic Technology and other places

This study examines the coopetition decision‐making in an online game supply chain involving two online game development enterprises (the developers) and one online game sales platform (the platform). In supply chain cooperation, competing developers can cooperate with the platform either separately or collectively. In contrast to previous studies, this study not only examines online games, with their unique cost structures, but also innovatively uses product quality as a decision variable in the characterization of product demand. It begins by constructing decision‐making models that reflect three different coopetition situations among enterprises in the online game supply chain: a competition model, a separate bargaining model, and a collective bargaining model. Equilibrium analysis of the decision‐making models is then used to obtain the enterprises' optimal coopetition strategies, and to reveal how these strategies depend on product substitutability and bargaining power. Finally, a comparative analysis of the coopetition models is used to identify the optimal coopetition strategy in the online game supply chain and reveal this strategy's dependence on product substitutability, bargaining power, and internal operating capabilities. These findings provide strategic guidance for enterprises in the online game supply chain about how to pursue coopetition within various business environments.

This study investigates an original equipment manufacturer's (OEM's) outsourcing choice between a competing manufacturer (CP) and a non‐competing manufacturer (NP). We develop a benchmark self‐produce strategy and two outsourcing strategies to differentiate two manufacturing service providers, and examine the optimal strategy alongside an analysis of the respective incentives (e.g., a lump‐sum payment) from the two service providers. The optimal strategy depends on the difference in production efficiency, degree of product substitution, and joint effect of the transfer payments. The transfer payments contribute to a greater range of Pareto improvements, increasing the possibility of outsourcing cooperation while highlighting the role of competition intensity on the model and outsourcing cooperation partner. Effect analysis shows that in the absence of transfer payment, the optimal strategy is beneficial to social welfare. With transfer payment, the optimal strategy is changed and the firms will be more profitable, but at the expense of customers' surplus, which may result in worse social welfare. An extended analysis of mixed strategies, in which the OEM produces part of the products and outsources the rest to CP/NP, shows that while the mixed‐CP strategy can be an optimal choice, the mixed‐NP strategy will degenerate to either self‐produce or complete outsourcing to NP under certain conditions.

Blood is a living tissue of unique value to the human body and has special features with short shelf life, unpredictable supply, and stochastic demand. The efficiency of blood management affects the quality of medical services. Scholars pay more attention to demand uncertainty than to supply uncertainty in blood supply chain management, which leads to a lack of research on supply uncertainty in such management. We take supply uncertainty into account and discuss three different uncertainty scenarios: optimistic, average, and pessimistic supply scenarios. Different supply scenarios will affect not only the quantity of orders but also the inventory freshness. To balance the fairness of the old inventory allocation, we designed a hybrid allocation policy of old stocks by order share and batch allocation of other stocks by hospital priority. The simulation results reveal the direct and cross effects of supply uncertainty, life cycle, and old inventory ratio (OIR) policy on the system-wide outdating rate. First, for the effect of supply uncertainty, when it is smaller, the system’s outdate rate grows with the increase of its intensity, but when it is larger, the outdate rate hardly grows and even decreases in intensity. Especially, when the supply uncertainty is larger, the expected supply scenarios have no significant effect on the outdate rate. Second, for the effect of product shelf life, when the shelf life is longer, the OIR policy can significantly reduce the system’s outdate rate in the optimistic or average supply scenarios and has little impact on the rate in the pessimistic supply scenario. Third, for the effect of the OIR policy, when the intensity of supply uncertainty is smaller, the OIR policy leads to a large increase in the system’s outdate rate as supply uncertainty grows. However, when the intensity of supply uncertainty is larger, the range of increase in system outdate rate further increases in the optimistic scenario. In contrast, in the pessimistic scenario, it will decrease. Besides, the OIR policy will have no significant effect on the outdate rate when the supply uncertainty is smaller.

Choosing an appropriate selling model for online retailing is a crucial problem faced by many e-commerce platforms and manufacturers. We examined three popular selling models on e-commerce platforms—the reselling model, the agency selling model, and the advertising service model—and examined the impact of product features, service efficiency, and interfirm power relationships on the choice of selling models. The problem was analyzed as a two-stage bargaining problem between a platform and a manufacturer under service-sensitive demand. We show that the choice of selling models is influenced by the interfirm power relationship, firms’ service efficiencies, and demand sensitivities. Specifically, when the manufacturer dominates the bargaining game, it is always beneficial to choose the agency selling model, except when the manufacturer has lower service efficiency than the platform and customer demand is extremely sensitive to service. In contrast, when the platform has the dominant bargaining power, it should always opt for the reselling model if it has better service efficiency than the manufacturer. As the price and service sensitivities of customer demand increase, their influences in determining the optimal selling model increase. The advertising service model becomes a viable option only when the manufacturer has superior service efficiency but less bargaining power than the platform and when there is low price sensitivity but high service sensitivity. In addition, we considered a two-part tariff selling model that includes a fixed membership fee and a unit transaction rate, and different direct sales costs for the platform under the three selling models.

In light of the growing prevalence of online and offline mixed channels, in this article, we examine the channel expansion strategy of adding offline store channels to an online direct channel for a manufacturer. Based on the Nash program framework, this article considers two alternative mixed-channel strategies, namely a conventional wholesale channel and a franchise store channel. By comparing the subgame perfect equilibrium solutions of these two mixed-channel formats to the benchmark strategy, where the manufacturer only engages in the online direct channel, we evaluate the effects of the two online-to-store mixed-channel strategies on optimal direct selling prices, the manufacturer's profits, and overall social welfare. The results indicate that a manufacturer's optimal channel expansion strategy is mainly governed by the trade-off between the extra revenue gained from the newly added offline channel and the economic loss from the direct online channel induced by channel competition. The manufacturer's negotiation power, unit production cost, and heterogeneity between the two channels are the key factors determining the relative gains and losses. In addition, our results demonstrate that both online-to-store mixed-channel strategies yield positive effects on social performance compared with the online direct channel.

Applications of blockchain in supply chain management (SCM) have received extensive attention among academics and industrial practitioners. Most current blockchain-related review papers focus on the values, methodologies, barriers, trends, and challenges of blockchain applications in the supply chain (SC) context. Despite some papers discussing blockchain’s role in SCs from a specific perspective, the existing review papers mainly concentrate on blockchain’s influence on one of the three critical SC flows. Hence, this study comprehensively reviews 251 academic papers to capture the precise impacts of blockchain on the material, information, and money flows in SCM. Following the above analyses, a conceptual framework is put forward to accentuate blockchain’s influence on SCM. By unveiling a comprehensive research landscape, this study offers valuable viewpoints and vital information for scholars and practitioners to better identify research frontiers and themes of blockchain applications in SCM.