Developing a comprehensive service strategy to optimize customer satisfaction presents an ongoing challenge for effective facility provider. The essence of comprehensive systems is selecting the suitable service design, establishing an effective service delivery process, and building continuous improvement. This research analyzes a finite capacity service system incorporating several realistic customer-server dynamics: customer impatience, server’s partial breakdown, and threshold recovery policy. When the number of customers is more, the server is under pressure to increase the service rate to mitigate the service system’s load. Motivating from this fact, the concept of service pressure condition is also incorporated. For characterization, we evaluate state probabilities derived using the matrix-analytic method and henceforth several performance measures. To address the cost optimization problem involving the developed Chapman-Kolmogorov forward differential-difference equations and determine optimal operational parameters, we employ the recently devised cuckoo search (CS) optimization approach. A comparative analysis is performed with the semi-classical optimizer: quasi-Newton (QN) method, and metaheuristics technique: particle swarm optimization (PSO), to validate the efficacy of results. Lastly, several numerical illustrations are depicted in different tables and graphs to understand essential characteristics quickly.

This paper explores quality disclosure strategy in an e-supply chain including a supplier and an e-retailer driven by blockchain technology (BT), wherein the supplier possesses private quality information and has the option to encroach on the end market. We investigate the no-encroachment and encroachment scenarios under the three quality disclosure strategies (i.e., non-disclosure strategy, voluntary disclosure strategy and BT-supported disclosure strategy). The impact of supplier encroachment and firms’ preference for disclosure strategies are examined. The analysis shows that regardless of the strategy chosen, encroachment always benefits the supplier but, under certain conditions, benefits the e-retailer. Interestingly, with no-encroachment, both the supplier and the e-retailer have the same preference for disclosure strategies. With encroachment, however, the supplier prefers the voluntary disclosure strategy when both the quality variability and direct selling cost are small, and BT’s operation cost is relatively large; otherwise, he prefers the BT-supported disclosure strategy. For the e-retailer, she always prefers both the voluntary and BT-supported disclosure strategies. Additionally, it is observed that the BT-supported disclosure strategy emerges as optimal for both the supplier and the e-retailer when faced with significant quality variability, regardless of encroachment. Encroachment and adopting BT can generate more consumer surplus under certain conditions. Finally, we extend the basic model by considering simultaneous quantity decision and find that keying findings are robustness. Afterwards, management insights are covered and given.

Quality emerges as a pivotal competitive factor for agricultural products. Recently, retailers within agricultural supply chains have begun investing in technologies to improve quality and designing contracts to incentivize farmers to enhance their labor inputs. The farmers and the retailers incur different quality investment costs, with this cost increasing in the quality they provide. Simultaneously, retailers have embraced the farmer-competition strategy, employing competition to stimulate improved agricultural product quality among farmers. We construct a Stackelberg game model to analyze how farmers’ quality investment, retailer’s contract design, and profits are affected by the retailer’s farmer-competition strategy. We show that the farmer competition introduced by the retailer is not always effective in improving the farmer’s quality investment. Similarly, the competition cannot always lead to additional profits for the retailer. Moreover, the supply chain profit suffers from the retailer’s farmer-competition strategy when the competition intensity between farmers is relatively large. Our results offer insights for retailers by identifying how should the retailer design the contract to improve the farmer’s quality effort given the existence of the farmer competition and under what conditions the retailer should adopt the farmer-competition strategy.

Investment and technology cooperation has become prevalent among manufacturers for reducing carbon emission. However, the success and sustainability of such cooperation can be restrained by firm opportunism. This study investigates the impact of three different cooperation modes (CER investment cooperation, information sharing cooperation, and comprehensive cooperation) on manufacturers’ efforts for carbon emission reduction (CER). We also analyze how opportunism in key resources input affects the CER cooperation, and explore the influence of carbon tax and consumer environmental awareness (CEA) on opportunistic motivation. Our results show that 1) Manufacturers engaged in cooperation will increase their profits, but may not necessarily lessen carbon emission, which is related to the intensity of market competition. 2) The optimal mode for manufacturers is comprehensive cooperation, followed by information sharing cooperation, and then is CER investment cooperation. 3) Opportunism is not necessarily detrimental to CER. 4) In the comprehensive cooperation mode, the impact of opportunism to the co-operative manufacturer is hierarchical, and whether the cooperation continues depends on the intensity of market competition. 5) CEA will encourage the opportunism, while the effect of carbon tax on opportunistic motivation is related to the market size.

In this paper, we deal with the problem of cost allocation among multiple retailers in an inventory system with transportation quantity discount under the widely-used carbon tax regulation. We first develop an inventory model with transportation discount under the carbon tax policy, and determine the optimal order quantity per order such that the total cost is minimized in the case of individual and joint ordering. We show that the total cost for the group of retailers can be reduced by placing joint orders while the total carbon emissions may increase. Then, we provide a sufficient condition which indicates that when the costs and carbon emissions associated with each order initiated are relatively high, enterprises can achieve dual objectives (both carbon emission reduction and cost reduction) through joint ordering. To allocate the total cost among the retailers, we introduce an inventory game and show that this game is concave. Based on this, we propose a cost allocation rule, which belongs to the core of the game.