Firm decisions and government subsidies in a supply chain with consumer surplus consideration

Abstract This paper considers a supply chain that consists of a manufacturer and a retailer, who concern their respective profits as well as consumer welfare. Each firm's objective is modelled as a weighted sum of its profit and consumer surplus, with the weight on consumer surplus representing the concern level of the firm. We first examine a push supply chain where the manufacturer determines the wholesale price and the retailer determines the order quantity. We derive the optimal decisions and investigate the impact of the firms' consumer surplus consideration on the interactive decisions of the supply chain members and the overall performance of the supply chain. We show that a higher level of retailer's consumer concern does not necessarily lead to higher consumer surplus because her concern on consumers may be exploited by the manufacturer to improve his objective; and the manufacturer's concern on consumers may not benefit the retailer in terms of her profit, especially when the manufacturer's concern level is relatively low. Nevertheless, compared to the for‐profit supply chain, concern on consumer surplus could be beneficial to both firms' profits as well as consumer surplus, inducing a “win‐win‐win” situation under certain conditions. Furthermore, as a social planner, the government seeks to optimize social welfare by adopting subsidy policies, and we examine two types of intervention policies, that is, subsidizing firms and subsidizing consumers. We show that when subsidizing firms, government's quantity‐based subsidy is always more cost‐effective than sales‐based subsidy. As the firms' concern levels become higher or the demand uncertainty becomes lower, subsidizing consumers can achieve higher social welfare than subsidizing firms. Moreover, we examine the impact of the government's budget constraint and concern level on consumer surplus, and extend the analysis to a pull supply chain to show the robustness of the major findings.