关键词: 双渠道供应链, 品牌危机, 微分博弈, 质量, 营销

Abstract: This paper aims to study the impact of potential brand crisis upon dynamic quality and marketing decisions in a dual-channel supply chain system consisting of a manufacturer, an online retailer, and an offline retailer. To this end, it constructs a dynamic dual-channel supply chain model potentially confronted by a random brand crisis. By employing the Bellman dynamic programming theory, it derives the optimal decisions of supply chain members on both pre- and post-crisis stages. The results show that the manufacturer’s quality investment and online retailer’s advertising investment are lower than those with no crisis while offline retailer’s promotion investment will not be affected by the crisis. If the long term effect of the crisis outweighs its short term effect, the manufacturer and the online retailer should lower their investment after the crisis but if the long term effect is less dominant than the short term effect, the manufacturer and the online retailer have to refer to the value of hazard rate before making their decision after the crisis. The manufacturer’s cost-sharing strategy can not only boost online retailer’s advertising investment but also enhance his own quality investment. This paper depicts the brand crisis by introducing the random occurrence process and relax the usual assumption that goodwill is always continuous during the whole planning period. Based on these work, it conducts the study of brand crisis in the dual-channel supply chain.

Key words: dual-channel supply chain, brand crisis, differential game, quality, marketing