In cross-border e-commerce, free-shipping service and product price jointly influence consumers' purchase decisions. When brand-owners offer free-shipping services, they will bear both logistics and import tariff fees. Otherwise, these fees will be paid by the consumers. In this paper, we study the free-shipping decisions of two brand-owners A and B when they sell through a common cross-border e-commerce platform with the consideration of the two-dimensional competition of product and logistics service. We develop four strategy combinations (N,N), (N,F), (F,N) and (F,F) and focus on the strategies of brand-owners A and B in terms of free-shipping. We find that the relative size of logistics service costs paid by brand owners and consumers and product differentiation have a decisive influence on brand owners' decisions on free-shipping. We find that there exist three equilibrium strategies (N,N), (N,F), and (F,F) when the two brand-owners' products are highly differentiated, depending on the logistics fee directly borne by consumers. In contrast, when product competition is fierce, (N,N) and (F,F) are the equilibrium strategies. The tariff rate may affect the possibility of various equilibriums significantly, and the increase of tariff rate may lead to the convergence of brand owners' free-shipping strategies, that is, (N,N) and (F,F) are more likely to occur. This shows the unique role of tariffs in the decision of corporate in cross-border settings.

The recession of globalization brings about the layout adjustment of global value chains and seriously threatens the security of supply chains.The COVID-19 pandemic aggravates various uncertainties and greatly affects the operations of supply chains.Meanwhile,emerging technologies such as digitalization are propelling business innovations and providing new opportunities for the value creations of supply chains.Operations optimization is committed to facilitating efficient collaborations for achieving supply chain coordination.The interweaving of various variables in great changes further catalyzes the reinvention of supply chains towards platform-based ecosystems.The ecosystem promotes transboundary integrations of multi-entities by opening and sharing resources,builds ecological balances of the system by operations coordination and mutual benefit,energizes risk management and green operations by intelligentization,stimulates non-boundary innovations by structure reorganization and pattern transformation,and realizes the value co-creations of participators.Therefore,it is necessary to strengthen the philosophy of "community of interests",actuate resource sharing,risk sharing,mutual trust and benefit distribution through mechanism constructions,enhance ecological concept and value recognition,improve platform operations management,optimize ecosystem governance,create an open and innovative ecology,upgrade crisis management capability,and build ecosystems for enabling the high-quality development of supply chains.

This paper investigates the coordination problem between an online platform and a retailer in the omnichannel retailing with the introduction of buy-online and pick-up-in-store (BOPS). We consider customers' cross-buying behaviors that online customers will buy extra products when picking up products in store. In the traditional revenue sharing contract (referred to as RS), the revenue is shared between the upstream and downstream members. However, considering customers' cross-buying behaviors in the BOPS retailing, the downstream retailer gains an extra revenue. Thus, we designed another mechanism-The bilateral revenue sharing contract (referred to as BRS) to coordinate the proposed system. With the BRS contract, the e-commerce platform shares its BOPS revenue with the retailer and the retailer shares its cross-selling revenue with the platform. The results show that:The BRS contract degenerates into the RS contract when the one of parameter equal to 0 and it cannot coordinate the BOPS system, while the BRS contract can coordinate the system when the margin revenue of the cross-selling is low. Furthermore, we discuss another contract, the Mixed contract (referred to as MC), based on the RS and TPT. We find that the BRS contract can coordinate the system when the margin revenue of the cross-selling is low, the MC does when the margin is not too high, and when the margin is below the medium level, whether to adopt the BRS contract or the MC contract depends on the bargain power of the e-commerce platform.

The "double points" policy requires a higher automotive quality, energy conservation and emission reduction from the supply side. This paper, by considering the vehicle price, carbon remission reduction (consumers' low-carbon preference), and consumers' concerns about the mileage range in one charge from the demand side, studied the supply chain decision and coordination issue of a two-tier supply chain consisted by two carmakers and a dealer. The optimization decision and corresponding parameters of automobile supply chain was firstly analyzed, and then the coordination effects of three different supply chain contracts were explored, which was followed by a numerical analysis to verify the theoretical conclusions. The research findings are as follows:1) The improvement of consumers' low-carbon preference and consumers' concern about the mileage range in one charge can promote automobile manufacturers to further reduce their carbon emissions and improve the mileage range in one charge. 2) The increase of new energy vehicles' points ratio can restrain the production of fuel vehicles, but cannot promote the improvement of emission reduction efforts. There is a positive correlation between new energy vehicles' score accounting coefficient and the promotion effects to new energy vehicle industry. 3) Neither cost sharing nor revenue sharing contracts can completely eliminate the "double" marginal effect (which can only achieve Pareto improvement), while the two-part tariff contract can fully coordinate automobile supply chain.

Prior literature has studied extensively on store brand entry under different power structures between the national-brand manufacturer and the retailer. This paper considers the characteristic and the relationship between two alternative Stackelberg games (manufacturer-led and retailer-led) with store brand entry under an asymmetric demand scenario where the retailer possesses the private demand information. The results show that the impacts of the store brand on the players' profits under each Stackelberg games are different. In addition, when the information is asymmetric, the first-mover advantage for the firms may disappear and they can obtain more profits when acting as the follower. Finally, the players' preference for informational acquisition capability and the information sharing between firms also show some significant differences between different power structures.

Based on the B2C e-retailer's retail and online marketplace platform attributes, this paper builds four supply chain operation modes for new and old products from the perspective of a manufacturer, namely, online reselling mode for new and old products, online hybrid sales mode I (online agency selling mode for new product, online reselling mode for old product), online hybrid sales mode II (online reselling mode for new product, online agency selling mode for old product) and online agency selling mode for new and old products, simultaneously, establishes the demand model of the new and old products considering the heterogeneities of consumer's preferences to the new and old products, analyzes the supply chain members' optimal pricing under four types of sales channel structure, and provides the decision basis for the channel selection of the manufacturer's new and old products. Research results are as follows: When the transaction fee ratio charged by B2C marketplace platform is small, the manufacturer should choose the online agency selling mode to sell new and old products no matter how much the customer acceptance of old product is. Otherwise, the manufacturer should choose the online reselling mode to sell new and old products. In addition, when the transaction fee ratio charged by B2C marketplace platform and the customer acceptance of old products are simultaneously large or small, the online hybrid sales mode I is superior to the online hybrid sales mode II. When the value of the transaction fee ratio charged by B2C marketplace platform is opposite to the customer acceptance of old product, the online hybrid sales mode II is superior to the online hybrid sales mode I.

In this paper, a biform game is used to study the cooperation and technological innovation of two-stage cloud service supply chain, which is composed of one cloud application developer and three cloud service operators. The strategy selection of supply chain members is analyzed according to non-cooperative game. The clique solution of cooperative game is used to distribute the profits of cooperative developers and operators. The results obtained in this paper show that, when not considering the technological innovation of the downstream operators, the upstream developers will choose the combination of stronger operators for cooperation, and only when the cost of labeling is low they will choose the branding strategy to increase the distribution revenue. When considering the technological innovation of the downstream operators, the poor downstream operators are only likely to cooperate with the developers if their innovation revenue is higher than that of the stronger operators, and only the operators cooperating with the developers will choose the technological innovation. The conclusion obtained in this paper will provide operational suggestions for the strategy choice and the distribution of benefits of the two-stage supply chain with multi-developers and multi-operators.

Based on the random yield of agricultural products and the unequal bargaining power between agribusiness firm and farmers, this study develops an internal financing decision model of a contract-farming supply chain consists of a single farmer with financial constraints and a single firm with sufficient capital, compares and analyzes the optimal production decisions of farmers, the optimal acquisition price decision of firms, and the financing decision-making and expected incomes of the two sides, in the situation when the firm provides farmers targeted financing (production materials or technical guidance and training) or non-targeted financing (advance payment/deposit) respectively. The study found that:1) No matter whether the farmer is in bankruptcy risk or not, when the firm provides targeted financing of production materials, Pareto improvement can be realized in both parties' expected revenue, and both parties can reach the state of no capital constraint if the farmer has a certain amount of his/her own production funds. 2) When the farmer is not at risk of bankruptcy and the firm provides farmers targeted financing of technical guidance and training, both parties' expected revenue can be improved, and both parties can reach the state of no capital constraint if the farmer has a certain amount of his/her own production funds. In addition, When the farmer is at risk of bankruptcy and the firm provides farmers targeted financing of technical guidance and training, the optimal production input of farmers may be higher than the optimal production input without capital constraints, at which time the two parties get higher expected revenue than the expected revenue without capital constraints. 3) When the farmer is not at risk of bankruptcy and the firm provides non-targeted financing of interest-free, or when the farmer is at risk of bankruptcy and the firm provides non-targeted financing of charging appropriate interest, the result that the optimal decision and expected revenue of both parties are the same as those without capital constraint.

Considering the scenario of consumers' low-carbon preference, this paper studies manufacturers' emission reduction and retailers' low-carbon marketing strategies in the secondary supply chain dominated by manufacturer under the carbon cap-and-trade policy. Firstly, using the Stackelberg game model, the game payment matrix of manufacturer and retailer is constructed. Then the evolutionary stability strategy is obtained by using evolutionary game theory. Finally, the Matlab tool is used to simulate and analyze the binary equalization strategy. The results show that the existence of an evolutionary stabilization strategies is related to the carbon trading price. The factors that affect the evolutionary stabilization strategy include consumer carbon emission sensitivity coefficient, consumer marketing effort sensitivity coefficient, cost coefficient, etc. With the change of the coefficients, there will be a variety of evolutionary stabilization strategies. The study found that consumers' carbon sensitivity and marketing effort sensitivity are below a certain threshold, and relevant departments can promote manufacturers and retailers to evolve in favor of emission reduction by raising consumers' environmental awareness. However, when they are above this threshold, they will be counterproductive. It is also found that when the carbon trading price is lower than a certain value, the system has a unique equilibrium strategy, and the carbon cap-and-trade policy can effectively promote the evolution of manufacturers to emission reduction and retailers to low-carbon marketing.

In this paper, we present an optimal planning of vehicle routing problem with simultaneous delivery and pick-up for urban small package shipping under electronic commerce context. At the same time, the location strategy of the fast-pick areas are taken into consideration, vehicles can be replenished and unloading can be done at the fast-pick areas. The problem is formulated as two integer programming models which aim to reduce the operational cost of logistics enterprises with the consideration of routing, location and service strategies. A hybrid heuristic algorithm called CWIGALNS with different modified operators are proposed to solve the problem and the validity of the models and the reliability of CWIGALNS are assess on 9 small-scale instances. Finally, experiments are performed on multiple sets of instances belonging to two different series. The model in which unloading can be done at the fast-pick areas could decrease the operational cost with less vehicles. The models and algorithm proposed in this paper can provide good reference and help for the service strategy of urban small package shipping enterprises.

It is difficult to continue with the original plan when the disruption occurs in cold chain delivery of agricultural products. In this case, continuing with the original solution may not be optimal or practicable. First of all, by analyzing the effects of freshness and service time, a recovery model to measure the deviation for cold chain delivery of agricultural products is formed on the basis of disruption management. Then, a heuristic algorithm is demonstrated based on the strategy of next node selection, solution space reduction and combination with other heuristics. Finally, the comparison result proves that our approach is more practical than the existing rescheduling because the consumption safety is taken into consideration.

This paper studies a supply chain consisting of a manufacturer, a retailer, and consumers with low-carbon environmental awareness, in which the retailer is the leader and need to choose among three possible channel structures:A pure physical channel, a pure online channel, and dual channels. This paper builds a supply chain model considering the differences in both the unit carbon emission difference and channel operating cost between physical channel and online channel, and focuses on studying the retailer's channel strategy choice. We show that the unit carbon emission difference between physical channel and online channel is one of the significant factors driving the retailer's optimal channel strategy choice. In particular, given other factors, the retailer's optimal channel strategy will change from pure physical channel, to dual channels, and to pure online channel, as the unit carbon emissions level of physical channel relative to online channel increases. Meanwhile, the effect of unit carbon emission difference between channels on the retailers' channel selection strategies will be moderated by the difference in channel operating costs between channels. Furthermore, this paper also analyzes the retailer's optimal pricing decisions and find that when the retailer chooses a dual-channel strategy, the retailer should reduce the optimal retail price of the physical channel with the increase of the unit carbon emissions level of physical channel relative to online channel and the optimal online retail price depends on the physical channel's unit carbon emission level relative to the online channel. Further, the retailer can influence the manufacturer' optimal wholesale price by adding new online channel, thereby increasing the retailer' profits.

Based on consumer utility theory, the effects of consumer reference quality effect and online channel acceptance are incorporated into e-commerce supply chain (ECSC). The quality improvement strategies of manufacturers and product service strategies of retailers under the two channel structures of manufacturer's or retailer's ownership of online pioneering rights are studied by using differential game theory and continuous dynamic programming theory. It is found that for ECSC enterprises with the right to open online channels, whether they open online channels or not is related to consumers' acceptance of online channels. The sensitivity analysis of key parameters is carried out by numerical examples. It is found that: 1) Manufacturers have the right to open up online channels and sell through mixed online and offline channels can provide consumers with higher product quality and stimulate retailers' offline service level, thus bringing higher brand goodwill to enterprises. 2) For the profit of each enterprise, it is more advantageous for the other party to open up online channels; for the supply chain as a whole, the retailer online and offline mixed sales model is more conducive to long-term development. 3) Improving consumers' acceptance of online channels, focusing on online channel sales, supplemented by offline services, and reducing the negative impact of consumer reference quality effect on all aspects of supply chain operation is the way for enterprises to operate for a long time.

Price fluctuation sales is popular in lots of trading activities, which may lead to uncertainty of demand, making retailers more likely to suffer from understock or overstock. Thus, the ordering problem is important when price fluctuation occurs. This paper studies one-period ordering problem when retail prices fluctuate with uncertain demand. An optimization model is established aiming at minimizing expected loss. By adopting price interval partition, an approximate solution is derived. The convergence and existence of the solution are theoretically proved, and the solution algorithm is given in the case of finite samples. Numerical experiments are carried out showing that the expected losses caused by price fluctuation is much more lower through the proposed model as compared to that in traditional newsvendor model. The mean value of retail prices and the deviation of demand have some effect on the optimal ordering quantity.

Supply chain finance plays an important role in alleviating the fund shortage of small and medium-sized enterprises and optimizing the fund flow of supply chain. At present, the development of supply chain finance is facing an important point: The Corona Virus Disease (COVID-19) has a wide impact on the global economy, which not only generates the strong demand for supply chain finance, but also brings new uncertainty. At the same time, the accelerated development of Fintech provides more possibilities and tools for supply chain finance model innovation and risk management. This paper summarizes the current situation of supply chain finance from two aspects of practical development and theoretical research, and analyzes its future development trend. First of all, the practical development of supply chain finance is sorted out and divided into four stages for analysis. Secondly, with the help of bibliometrics tools, this paper analyzes and compares English and Chinese literature, and summarizes the theoretical research status from three aspects: Theoretical basis, optimization decision-making and risk management. Finally, there are three development trends of supply chain finance in the future, that is, the formation of healthy network ecosystem is an important basis for the development of supply chain finance, the adoption of modern Fintech enabling is a powerful tool for the development of supply chain finance, and bearing the social responsibility of sustainable development is the long-term goal of supply chain finance development. Meanwhile, it gives five key research issues that deserve attention.

Sustainable operations management is becoming a new and important research field in operations management. According to the literature and enterprises' practices on sustainable operations, we propose a research framework for sustainable operations management and conduct a network analysis on keywords of the sample papers to group the research sub-areas. On this basis, we summarize the research development process of sustainable operation management: "from internal operations to external operations", "from forward supply chains to reverse supply chains", "evolution of research themes of sustainable operations" and reveal the research gaps. Finally, we propose three research directions of sustainable operations management: "from supply chains to value chains", "integration of forward and reverse supply chains", "economic, environment and social coordinated development". We expect to provide implications for further studies in the field of sustainable operations management.

Green management is becoming a new norm, and reverse logistics management is becoming a hot topic in academia and industry. Scholars have made a lot of studies on reverse logistics management, including returns mode and sustainability development in the past decades, to enrich the theory and solve some fundamental scientific problems. Reverse logistics management in the current era focuses not only on the profit earned, but also the demand from markets. In this paper, we make a comprehensive overview on the reverse logistics studies in the past decades, and sum up the research progress and logic. Based on the above, we point out the future research directions in this field, which provides the references for relevant scholars, especially in China.

In recent years, the new retail mode of online-merge-offline has developed rapidly, accelerated the new changes of China and even the world's retail industry, and greatly affected and changed people's production and consumption patterns. This new model realizes the complementary advantages of online and offline, and promotes a new business model. With the rapid development and practice of this new retail mode, its features of coordination, integration, networking, digitalization and intelligence bring unprecedented challenges to this new retail mode, which makes the operation and management of new retail enterprises face many difficulties. From the perspective of value co-creation, this paper analyzes several core issues of the operation and management of the new retail mode, focusing on the innovation of the new retail mode based on value co-creation, the incentive mechanism of multi-stakeholder collaborative operation, the dynamic pricing of omni-channel products driven by consumer demand, the omni-channel operation and inventory management of the new retail mode, and the real-time collaborative distribution optimization about "last mile" logistics. In this paper, the related research of the above issues at home and abroad are summarized, and the development trend of future research is prospected.

The liability cost sharing contract has been widely used by the firms in supply chains to avoid the occurrence of a product safety incident. In view of it, by considering a supply chain that consists of a manufacturer and a retailer, this paper studies the impacts of the liability cost sharing on the manufacturer's quality decisions under three different channel power structures, and then investigates the impacts of channel power structures on the equilibrium results and coordinations. The results show that: an increase in the share of the liability cost allocated to the manufacturer has no impact on the product quality level and the profitability for each supply chain member if the manufacturer is the leader of supply chain, but leads to a higher product quality level and higher profits for both supply chain members if the manufacturer's leader position is lost; the quality level of the product reaches the first-best level of the supply chain system if the manufacturer is the leader; the manufacturer, instead of the retailer, can benefit from its relatively higher channel power; when the manufacturer has a relatively higher channel power, a scheme combining a retailer's revenue sharing contract and a manufacturer's transfer payment contract can effectively coordinate the supply chain, otherwise, the decentralized supply chain can be coordinated by a same scheme which consists of a manufacturer's revenue sharing contract, a retailer's quality cost sharing contract, and a retailer's transfer payment contract.

In new normal period, investment and loan linkage financing plays an significance proposition to enhance the ability and willingness of financial institutions to serve the real economy. Reasonable supply chain contract structure is a fundamental measure to promote the deep integration of financial capital and supply chain, and to prevent risks in the financial system. This paper depicts the new characteristics of enterprise credit reconstruction and operation decision transfer, established a wholesale price (revenue sharing) contract model under the retailer's investment and loan linkage financing and explore the selection mechanism of contract structure and efficiency improvement space. The key finding is that the chosen mechanism of supply chain contract structure depends on the comparison of transaction cost reduction (synergistic benefit) and supply chain cost in investment and loan linkage financing. In addition, the revenue sharing contract could coordinate supply chain members and financial institutions to achieve "Pareto improvement", and there is a "upside down" phenomenon between interest rate and effort cost disturbance risk.