Research on retail channel decisions considering consumer’s fairness concern

School of Economics and Management, Southeast University, Nanjing, P.R. China

^* Corresponding author: zhangyl@seu.edu.cn

Received: 31 December 2020
Accepted: 21 November 2021

Abstract

Online retailing provides alternative shopping channels, where the retail platform can either let manufacturers directly sell to consumers or open a self-operated channel, or even both. Regardless of sales channels, consumers often pay attention to the income gap between themselves and enterprises (named consumer’s fairness concern). In this work, we explore how consumers’ fairness concerns affect the optimal decisions of both manufacturer and retail platform under different retail channel modes (single-channel mode and mixed-channel mode). The results show that consumer’s fairness concern has a negative impact on the retail price under low production cost in single-channel mode, while the retail prices in mix-channel mode are jointly determined by consumer’s fairness concern and revenue sharing ratio. Besides, if the market channel mode has not yet formed, the retail platform can choose either a self-operated channel or manufacturer consignment channel, depending on the consumer’s fairness concern level and revenue sharing ratio. By contrast, if the market channel mode has already been formed, the retail platform should make effort to reduce consumer’s fairness concern if only the self-operated channel exists, while maintain consumer’s fairness concern and revenue sharing ratio at a moderate level if there exist mixed channels.