Blockchain technology has attracted widespread attention due to its advantages of decentralization, as well as non-tampering, transparency, and traceability of information. Fourth-party logistics systems that do not use blockchain incur transaction costs and service quality losses due to the inability to fully control the delivery process, whereas the use of blockchain eliminates the transaction costs and quality losses, but the use of blockchain needs implementation and marginal use costs. To study the conditions for the use of blockchain technology, consider the fourth-party logistics system does not use and uses blockchain technology, and the equilibrium strategies in the two cases are compared. Numerical experiments show that there exists a certain range of blockchain costs which leads to a Pareto improvement in profits for both fourth-party logistics and third-party logistics and an improvement in the quality of logistics services when using blockchain.

This paper considers a sales mode selection problem under revenue sharing contracts between resale and agency modes for risk-averse manufacturers with traditional retail channel, direct selling channel, and e-commerce platform channel. By considering the factors including price competition intensity, market share, revenue sharing ratio, commission rate, and degree of risk aversion, we construct leader-follower game models with manufacturers as leaders and traditional retailers and e-commerce platforms as followers. To obtain optimal solutions, we discuss conditions to ensure the upper and lower models to be convex and then give the optimal strategies for all members in the network. Through numerical experiments, we analyze the involved parameters’ impact on sales mode selection strategy and the changing trends of each member's optimal pricing and profit under different sales modes. The numerical results reveal the following revelations: The manufacturer should choose the agency mode when the commission rate is low and the direct selling channel has a large market share. If both the commission rate and degree of risk aversion are high, direct selling channels have a low market share, and price competition intensity is weak, the manufacturer should choose the resale mode. The degree of risk aversion has an effect on each member’s optimal decision. Regardless of which sales mode the manufacturer chooses, the optimal price of each member decreases as the degree of risk aversion increases. Under certain conditions, the manufacturer’s choice of agency mode can create win-win situations with supply chain members.

In this paper, we design a revenue sharing contract to coordinate pricing and inventory control decisions in a serial supply chain consisting of one supplier, one manufacturer and one retailer. We assume that the retailer faces Poisson demand and his unsatisfied demands will be lost. The retailer applies one-for-one period policy in which he constantly places an order for one unit of product to the manufacturer in a predetermined time interval which results in a deterministic demand for the manufacturer. Solution procedures are developed to find the equilibrium in the Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) program with a revenue sharing contract, in which no party is willing to deviate from for the sake of maximizing his own profit. Furthermore, we formulate the total profit of the system and obtain the optimal retail price and order cycle for the retailer and the inventory policy of manufacturer which maximizes the supply chain’s total profit and at the end we will highlight the revenue sharing contract performance.

Supply chain members cannot act independently and they need to act as a part of a unified system and coordinated with other members. Therefore, a coordination mechanism may be necessary to motivate members to achieve coordination. In this paper, the coordination problem is studied in a two-level supply chain consisting of a supplier and a retailer where demand is a function of price and advertising expenditures in two scenarios. The first scenario is “No coordination”, and the other scenario is “coordination with Revenue sharing contract”. The models are solved using game theory, Cooperative and Nash equilibrium. Finally, numerical examples are presented indicating that the average expected profit in the second scenario, coordination with revenue sharing, is higher than the first scenario. In addition numerical examples indicate that as price and advertising elasticity to demand increase, profitability of supply chain decreases.