Pricing decisions in a two-echelon decentralized supply chain using bi-level programming approach

Pricing is one of the major aspects of decision making in supply chain. In the previous works mostly a centralized environment is considered indicating the retailers cannot independently apply their decisions on the pricing strategy. Although in a two-echelon decentralized environment it may be possible that supply chain contributors have encountered with different market power situations which provide that some of them try to impose their interests in pricing and/or volume of the products. In such situations the leader-follower Stackelberg game or more specifically bi-level programming seems to be the best approach to overcome the problem. Furthermore, in this study we consider the impacts of disruption risk caused by foreign exchange uncertainty on pricing decisions in a multi-product two-echelon supply chain. Also it is assumed that the market is partitioned to domestic and international retailers with segmented market for each retailer. The purpose of this paper is to introduce decisions policy on the pricing such that the utility of both manufacturer and retailers is met. Since the proposed bi-level model is NP-hard, a simulated annealing method combining with Tabu search is proposed to solve the model. A numerical example is presented to investigate the effect of foreign exchange variation on the decision variables through different scenarios. The results from numerical example indicate that the international retailers are indifferent to the manufacture undergoes changes where the domestic retailers react to changes, dramatically.