Joint decisions for Cold Chain Cross-border E-commerce with Overseas Warehouse Logistics Outsourcing

Abstract

Considering a two-echelon supply chain consisting of one overseas warehouse logistics provider and one cross-border e-commerce retailer with cold chain products over a finite time horizon, this paper studies the optimal decision-making of logistics pricing, freshness-keeping effort level and cold chain product pricing under the Stackelberg game and the cooperative game, and makes a comparative analysis of the two models. Through two-person cooperative game of transferable payment, it is proved that (1)both the total supply chain profit and individual profit of the two parties are greater than the Stackelberg game;(2) the freshness level is higher than that of the Stackelberg game;(3) the logistics price is lower than that of the Stackelberg game;(4) e-commerce transaction scale (i.e. logistics demand scale) is higher than that of the Stackelberg game; and (5) the retail price of the cold chain product is lower than the Stackelberg game. Numerical results bear out the validity of the theoretical models.