Pricing and effort investment for a newsvendor-type product

We investigate a dominant retailer's optimal joint strategy of pricing and timing of effort investment and analyze how it influences the decision of the manufacturer, the total supply chain profit, and the consumers' payoff. We consider two pricing schemes of the retailer, namely, dollar markup and percentage markup, and two effort-investment sequences, namely, ex-ante and ex-post. A combination of four cases is analyzed. Our results show that: (1) under the same effort-decision sequence, a percentage-markup pricing scheme leads to higher expected profit for the retailer and the whole supply chain, but a lower expected profit for the manufacturer and a higher retail price for the consumers; (2) under the same markup-pricing strategy, the dominant retailer always prefers to postpone her effort decision until the manufacturer makes a commitment to wholesale price, since it can result in a Pareto-improvement for all the supply chain members. That is, the retailer's and manufacturer's expected profits are higher and the consumers pay a lower retail price; and (3) among the four joint strategies, the dominant retailer always prefers the joint strategy of percentage-markup plus ex-post effort decision. However, the dominated manufacturer always prefers the joint strategy of dollar-markup plus ex-post effort decision, which is also beneficial to the end consumers.